Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov. Ex Libris: Lev Tikhomirov Lev Tikhomirov religious philosophical foundations of history

Lev Tikhomirov Religious philosophical foundations stories

M. Smolin. The comprehensive ideal of Lev Tikhomirov

Preface

Section I. Spiritual struggle in history

1. Philosophy of history and religion

2. Life goals and religious knowledge

3. God-seeking and Revelation

4. Approaching Personal God and the idea of the Kingdom of God

5. Removal from God the Creator and human autonomy

6. Historical development of basic religious and philosophical ideas

Division II. Pagan era

7. General character of paganism

8. Dispersion of the Deity in nature

9. Downplaying the concept of deity

10. The moral influence of paganism

11. Mysticism

12. Pagan philosophy of existence

13. The trend of irreligion

14. God-seeking of the classical world

15. Evolutionary potential of the idea of paganism

Division III. Revelation of the Supercreative Creator

16. Election of Israel

17. The Rise and Fall of Israel

18. Israel Mission

19. New Testament Revelation

20. The originality of the Christian teaching about God the Word

21. Legend of Christian esotericism

Division IV. Syncretic teachings

22. The meaning of syncretism

23. Gnosticism

24. Extra-Christian syncretism (Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, Manichaeism)

25. The emergence of Kabbalah

26. Kabbalistic worldview

27. Practical Kabbalah

28. General meaning of Kabbalah

Section V. Christian era

29. New Revelation. Life in Christ

30. Victory of Christianity

31. Development of dogma

32. Church and monasticism

33. Christian statehood

34. The coercive element in the history of Christianity

35. Christian culture

Section VI. Islam

Section VII. New Testament Israel

41. The fate of the Jews "golusa" (dispersion)

42. Jewish creation of the kingdom of Israel

43. Jews in Christendom

44. Jews in Turkey

45. The era of Jewish equality, or the Emancipation of the Jews

46. Organization and government of the Jews

47. Two Israels

Section VIII. Secret teachings and societies

Section IX. The Resurrection of Pagan Mysticism and Economic Materialism

Section X. Completing the circle of world evolution

63. Eschatological teaching

64. General character of contemplations and revelations

65. Old Testament prophecies

66. Millennial Kingdom (chiliasm)

67. Seven New Testament eras

68. The beginning of New Testament history

69. In the desert of the world

70. About the “retreat”, about the one who “detains” him and about the adulterous wife

71. Last times

@ Publication by the editors of the magazine "Moscow". 1997

The comprehensive ideal of Lev Tikhomirov

Name outstanding thinker Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov (1852-1923) still remains a mystery for Russian society. And many people are not familiar with it at all.

Meanwhile, anyone who was lucky enough to come into contact with the works and life story of L. A. Tikhomirov is amazed by the scale of his personality and the extraordinary nature of his fate. One of those who wrote about L. A. Tikhomirov argued that if F. M. Dostoevsky had lived longer, he could not help but create a novel about him...

Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov was born on January 19, 1852 in the military fortification of Gelendzhik in the Caucasus, in the family of a military doctor. After graduating from the Kerch Alexander Gymnasium with a gold medal, he entered the Imperial Moscow University in 1870, where he became part of the circle of Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries. In 1873, L. A. Tikhomirov was arrested and convicted in the case of the “193s”. He spends more than four years in the Peter and Paul Fortress. In 1878, in January, L. A. Tikhomirov was released, leaving him under administrative supervision with his parents. But already in October of the same year he secretly left parents' house and went underground to continue his revolutionary activities. At this time, he was already a member of "Land and Freedom", striving to carry out a coup d'etat with the aim of convening the Constituent Assembly or establishing a revolutionary dictatorship (depending on the prevailing circumstances).

Taking an active part in the revolutionary People's Will movement, L. A. Tikhomirov at the famous Lipetsk Congress on July 20, 1879 supported the congress's decision on regicide. As a member of the Executive Committee, he edited the party newspaper Narodnaya Volya, played a leading role in drawing up the Narodnaya Volya program, supervised other publications, and also edited most of the proclamations of the Executive Committee. The following year, he resigned from the membership of the Executive Committee, and therefore did not participate in casting a vote when making the decision on the regicide that followed on March 1, 1881.

After the assassination of Emperor Alexander II, the issue of the assassination of Emperor Alexander III was discussed among the Narodnaya Volya. L. A. Tikhomirov opposed this; and since, as a result of the arrests of the leaders of Narodnaya Volya, he occupied a leading position in the party in Russia, the Narodnaya Volya members limited themselves to a letter to Emperor Alexander III, containing revolutionary demands (the letter was written by L. A. Tikhomirov, and edited by N. K. Mikhailovsky).

Current page: 1 (book has 37 pages in total)

Lev Tikhomirov

RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL FUNDAMENTALS OF HISTORY

M. Smolin. The comprehensive ideal of Lev Tikhomirov

Preface

Section I. Spiritual struggle in history

1. Philosophy of history and religion

2. Life goals and religious knowledge

3. God-seeking and Revelation

4. Approaching the Personal God and the idea of the Kingdom of God

5. Removal from God the Creator and human autonomy

6. Historical development of basic religious and philosophical ideas

Division II. Pagan era

7. General character of paganism

8. Dispersion of the Deity in nature

9. Downplaying the concept of deity

10. The moral influence of paganism

11. Mysticism

12. Pagan philosophy of existence

13. The trend of irreligion

14. God-seeking of the classical world

15. Evolutionary potential of the idea of paganism

Division III. Revelation of the Supercreative Creator

16. Election of Israel

17. The Rise and Fall of Israel

18. Israel Mission

19. New Testament Revelation

20. The originality of the Christian teaching about God the Word

21. Legend of Christian esotericism

Division IV. Syncretic teachings

22. The meaning of syncretism

23. Gnosticism

24. Extra-Christian syncretism (Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, Manichaeism)

25. The emergence of Kabbalah

26. Kabbalistic worldview

27. Practical Kabbalah

28. General meaning of Kabbalah

Section V. Christian era

29. New Revelation. Life in Christ

30. Victory of Christianity

31. Development of dogma

32. Church and monasticism

33. Christian statehood

34. The coercive element in the history of Christianity

35. Christian culture

Section VI. Islam

Section VII. New Testament Israel

41. The fate of the Jews "golusa" (dispersion)

42. Jewish creation of the kingdom of Israel

43. Jews in Christendom

44. Jews in Turkey

45. The era of Jewish equality, or the Emancipation of the Jews

46. Organization and government of the Jews

47. Two Israels

Section VIII. Secret teachings and societies

Section IX. The Resurrection of Pagan Mysticism and Economic Materialism

Section X. Completing the circle of world evolution

63. Eschatological teaching

64. General character of contemplations and revelations

65. Old Testament prophecies

66. Millennial Kingdom (chiliasm)

67. Seven New Testament eras

68. The beginning of New Testament history

69. In the desert of the world

70. About the “retreat”, about the one who “detains” him and about the adulterous wife

71. End Times

The comprehensive ideal of Lev Tikhomirov

The name of the outstanding thinker Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov (1852 - 1923) still remains a mystery for Russian society. And many people are not familiar with it at all.

Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov was born on January 19, 1852 in the military fortification of Gelendzhik in the Caucasus, in the family of a military doctor. After graduating from the Kerch Alexander Gymnasium with a gold medal, he entered the Imperial Moscow University in 1870, where he fell into the circle of Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries. In 1873, L. A. Tikhomirov was arrested and convicted in the case of the “193s”. He spends more than four years in the Peter and Paul Fortress. In 1878, in January, L. A. Tikhomirov was released, leaving him under administrative supervision with his parents. But already in October of the same year, he secretly left his parents’ home and went underground to continue his revolutionary activities. At this time, he was already a member of "Land and Freedom", striving to carry out a coup d'etat with the aim of convening the Constituent Assembly or establishing a revolutionary dictatorship (depending on the prevailing circumstances).

All this time L.A. Tikhomirov had to wander around Russia. In the fall of 1882, wanting to avoid arrest, he went abroad - first to Switzerland and then to France. Here, in the spring of 1883, he, together with Lavrov, began publishing the Bulletin of Narodnaya Volya. Finding himself in the republican “advanced” France and having seen enough of parliamentary scandals, having become acquainted with the activities of party politicians, L. A. Tikhomirov begins to reconsider his Political Views. “From now on,” he writes in 1886, “we need to expect only from Russia, the Russian people, expecting almost nothing from revolutionaries... Accordingly, I began to reconsider my life. I must arrange it in such a way as to be able to to serve Russia as my instinct tells me, regardless of any parties" (Memoirs of Lev Tikhomirov. M., 1927).

Comparing weak France, torn by party strife (constantly “offended” by the German Empire) with a strong, stable Russian Empire, controlled by the firm hand of Emperor Alexander III, Tikhomirov draws conclusions not in favor of the first and not in favor of the democratic principle of power.

In parallel with political changes in the self-awareness of L. A. Tikhomirov, religious changes also occurred. The lukewarm attitude towards faith was replaced by an ardent desire to revive Orthodox man, which strengthened his conscious decision to break with the revolution. One day he opened the Gospel on the lines: “And he delivered him from all his sorrows, and gave him wisdom and the favor of the king Egyptian pharaoh". Again and again Lev Alexandrovich opened the Gospel, and each time the Gospel lines appeared before him. Tikhomirov gradually developed the idea that God was showing him the way - to turn to the Tsar with a request for mercy.

1888 was a turning point. A recent revolutionary writes and publishes a brochure “Why I Stopped Being a Revolutionary,” with which he breaks off relations with the world of revolution and talks about his new worldview. His goal is to return to his homeland. On September 12, 1888, L. A. Tikhomirov submitted to the Highest Name a request for pardon and permission to return to Russia, which was granted to him by the Highest Order of November 10, 1888.

Having received forgiveness, L. A. Tikhomirov arrived in St. Petersburg on January 20, 1889. He goes to the Peter and Paul Cathedral to venerate the ashes of Emperor Alexander II, against whose power he fought so fiercely as a revolutionary. This is how another transformation took place “from Saul to Paul.” The leader of the revolutionaries becomes a zealous supporter of autocracy and the largest ideologist of the monarchist movement.

The transition of L. A. Tikhomirov to the side of the Russian autocracy was a strong ideological blow for the revolutionary party. This act was perceived by the revolutionaries as a completely incredible event; it seemed as implausible as if Alexander III had joined the ranks of the revolutionaries. The resonance was great, and not only in the Russian environment, but also in international revolutionary circles. The famous Paul Lafargue wrote to Plekhanov that the arrival of Russian revolutionaries at the founding congress of the Second International “will be a response to Tikhomirov’s betrayal”... This was almost the only case in the history of revolutions when one of the most famous leaders, having abandoned the idea of revolution, becomes convinced and a consistent supporter of the monarchy, defending its principles for thirty years.

Since July 1890, L. A. Tikhomirov has lived in Moscow. He is a staff member of Moskovskie Vedomosti. L. A. Tikhomirov's journalistic speeches of this time were critical in nature: the revolution and the democratic principle of power were criticized. At the same time, he wrote a kind of trilogy - “Beginnings and Ends. Liberals and Terrorists”, “Social Mirages of Modernity” and “Struggle of the Century”. The first work that really gave him fame and notoriety in Russian society was the article “Bearer of the Ideal,” dedicated to the personality and activities of Emperor Alexander III (written immediately after the death of the Sovereign, in 1894). The poet Apollo Maykov said that “never has anyone expressed the idea of the Russian Tsar so accurately, clearly and truly” as the author of the article “Bearer of the Ideal.” Apollo Maikov wrote to L. A. Tikhomirov: “Everyone should read it... it should be printed as a separate brochure, sold for pennies, a portrait of the late Sovereign should be attached, this idea should be included in the public eye” (RGALI, f. 311, op. 21, d. 2, l. 1-2).

In 1895, L. A. Tikhomirov was elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Spiritual Enlightenment, and the next year he was elected a full member of the Society of Devotees of Russian Historical Enlightenment in memory of Emperor Alexander III.

With the book “Sole Power as a Principle of State Structure” (1897), another period of L. A. Tikhomirov’s work begins - the period of building a positive state-legal doctrine of the monarchical principle of power, which received its most complete completion in his book “Monarchical Statehood” (1905) .

L. A. Tikhomirov became the first Russian thinker to develop the doctrine of Russian statehood, its essence and the conditions of its action. He was the first to seriously study such a state phenomenon as the Russian autocracy. The state is the natural union of the nation. “The only institution,” says the researcher, “capable of combining both freedom and order, is the state” (“Workers and the State.” St. Petersburg, 1908. P. 34). One of the most characteristic and basic properties of a person is his desire for relationships with other people. A person’s sociality is the same instinct as his instinct to fight for his existence. Both of them are natural because they come from human nature itself. The state is the highest form of society. Society evolves from family and tribal unions to class unions, and with the development of human needs and interests it grows to the emergence of a higher power that unites all social groups of society - the state.

With the emergence of society, power arises in it as a natural regulator of social relations. The public is always characterized by the presence of power and subordination. When there is neither power nor subordination, then freedom comes in its pure form, but there is no longer a public, since any social system is full of struggle, which takes place either in rougher or softer forms. Power becomes a force that implements the highest principles of truth in society and in the state.

Society and power grow and develop in parallel, creating the statehood of nations. Depending on what a nation understands by the universal principle of justice, the supreme power represents one or another principle: monarchical, aristocratic or democratic. “It is necessary to recognize,” writes L. A. Tikhomirov, “all these three forms of power are special, independent types of power that do not arise from one another... These are completely special types of power that have different meaning and content. Move evolutionarily from one to another they cannot in any way, but they can replace each other in terms of dominance... The change in forms of supreme power can be considered as a result of the evolution of national life, but not as the evolution of power in itself... The basic forms of power themselves are not in any evolutionary relationship between not one of them can be called either the first, or the second, or the last phase of evolution. Not one of them, from this point of view, can be considered either higher, or lower, or primary, or final. ." ("Monarchical statehood").

The choice of the principle of Supreme Power depends on the moral and psychological state of the nation, on those ideals that shaped the nation’s worldview. If “a certain comprehensive ideal of morality is alive and strong in a nation,” L. A. Tikhomirov further develops his thought, “leading everyone in everything to the readiness of voluntary submission to oneself, then a monarchy appears, because at the same time for supreme domination moral ideal the action of physical force (democratic) is not required, the search and interpretation of this ideal (aristocracy) is not required, but only the best constant expression of it is necessary, for which an individual person as a morally rational being is most capable, and this person must only be placed in complete independence from any external influences capable of disturbing the balance of her judgment from a purely ideal point of view" ("Monarchical Statehood". P. 69).

After the publication of the book “Monarchical Statehood,” L. A. Tikhomirov was busy understanding the reform of the “Duma monarchy” system, as it developed after the publication of the new Basic Laws of 1906. The reform scheme proposed by L. A. Tikhomirov can be briefly defined as the introduction into the state system of monarchical popular representation with the legalized dominance of the voice of the Russian people, the purpose of which is to represent the opinions and needs of the people under the Supreme Power. He also stipulated the fact that “only civil groups can enjoy representation, and not anti-state elements, as now. In legislative institutions there cannot be representation from any groups hostile to society or the state...” (“Representation of the People under the Supreme Power ". M., 1910. P. 4).

After the so-called “third June coup” of 1907 (the dissolution of the Second State Duma and the publication of a new electoral law), P. A. Stolypin invited L. A. Tikhomirov to become an adviser (he is on the Council of the Main Directorate for Press Affairs as a specialist in working issues ) .

On Stolypin's instructions, he wrote several notes on the history of the labor movement and relations between the state and workers. L. A. Tikhomirov also wrote notes on the religious policy of the state, on the convening of the Church Council. Tikhomirov’s church-journalistic activity was, in particular, one of the motivating reasons for preparing church reform Emperor Nicholas II. The Emperor, having read his work “The Requests of Life and Our Church Administration” (1903), ordered Holy Synod discuss the issue of convening a Church Council. In 1906, the Pre-Conciliar Presence met, in which, by order of the Highest, L. A. Tikhomirov also participated.

After the death of the editor-publisher of Moskovskie Vedomosti, Professor Budilovich, L. A. Tikhomirov took up (1909) editing and publishing the oldest monarchist newspaper. According to the initial agreement with the Ministry of Internal Affairs (to whose department the newspaper belonged), the new editor was supposed to publish Moskovskie Vedomosti until the end of 1918; but the agreement could not be fully implemented by the ministry due to financial difficulties. L. A. Tikhomirov refuses to rent the newspaper at the end of 1913.

By this time, P. A. Stolypin was no longer alive: in government circles, no one was interested in L. A. Tikhomirov anymore. He returns to theoretical work again: he writes his second (after “Monarchical Statehood”) major work - “Religious and Philosophical Foundations of History,” consisting of ten sections. Work began in 1913 and was completed in 1918. What was the starting point in addressing such a fundamental topic?

Apparently, L. A. Tikhomirov’s interest in the philosophy of history and religion arose long before he freed himself from journalistic activities. Your articles on church issues L. A. Tikhomirov sometimes published in spiritual magazines. In 1907, he published reflections on the Apocalypse under the title “Apocalyptic Doctrine of the Fates and the End of the World” (January book of the Missionary Review); in the same year, the magazine “Christian” published an article “On the Seven Apocalyptic Churches.” Already in these two works it is easy to recognize the ideas underlying the eschatological reflections of the tenth section of the “Religious and Philosophical Foundations of History.”

After finishing the editorship of Moskovskie Vedomosti, L. A. Tikhomirov settled in Sergiev Posad (where he died on October 10, 1923). Proximity to the Moscow Theological Academy leads to acquaintance with its teachers - A. I. Vvedensky, M. D. Muretov, whose works he refers to in his new book. A certain connection between Tikhomirov’s religious and historical work can also be seen with the activities of the “Circle of Those Seeking Christian Enlightenment in the Spirit of the Orthodox Church.” Church of Christ"Mikhail Aleksandrovich Novoselov. Two works by L. A. Tikhomirov were published in the Novoselovskaya "Religious and Philosophical Library": "Personality, Society and the Church" (1904) and "Christian Love and Altruism" (1905). In 1916-1918, the philosopher read several reports in the auditorium of the “Religious and Philosophical Library” (at the apartment of M. A. Novoselov, opposite the Cathedral of Christ the Savior). The topics of Tikhomirov’s reports were “On Gnosticism”, “On the Logos and Philo of Alexandria”, “On the philosophy of Kabbalah”, “ On the philosophy of Vedanta,” “On Mohammedan mysticism” - correspond to many chapters of the book “Religious and Philosophical Foundations of History.” And in the manuscript of the book there are references to the works of two participants in the “Circle of Those Seeking Christian Enlightenment in the Spirit of the Orthodox Church of Christ” - V. A. Kozhevnikov and S.N. Bulgakov. It is quite possible that the publication of “Religious and Philosophical Foundations of History” was supposed to be carried out in the Novoselovsky series of the “Religious and Philosophical Library”.

The basis of Tikhomirov’s book was the idea of struggle in human world two worldviews: dualistic and monistic. The dualistic worldview recognizes the existence of two beings - the Being of God and the created being created by God. The monistic worldview asserts, in contrast, the unity of everything that exists, preaching the idea of a self-existent nature. Throughout human history, these ideas have waged an irreconcilable spiritual struggle among themselves, never dying, never mixing with each other, despite numerous attempts to syncretize them.

L. Tikhomirov’s book is devoted to analyzing the history of this spiritual struggle. It is all the more modern because it speaks not only about the past and present periods of this struggle, but also provides an analysis of human history in its last eschatological times. Tikhomirov’s book is also unique in that it is the first time in Russian that human history has been fully analyzed from a religious point of view. IN philosophical work Tikhomirov shows the logical development of religious movements in human societies, the mutual connection and continuity of religious ideas of different times, which either disappear from the historical scene or appear again, donning new guises. “The Kingdom of the world becomes the Kingdom of the Lord,” writes L. A. Tikhomirov. “Everything created comes to the harmony in which it was created.”

Mikhail SMOLIN

Preface

If we look at the history of mankind from a purely materialistic point of view, that is, as an outside observer, unable or unwilling to understand any inner meaning process taking place before us, we will see something reminiscent of the history of the geology of the Earth or the history of the plant and animal kingdom.

For long millennia, or tens, or even hundreds of thousands of years, the crust of the globe is covered with a changing carpet of plants. The picture does not remain unchanged before us. Delving into its changes, we will notice many well-known laws of its existence. The action of the Sun and the earth's atmosphere changes, the amount of moisture changes, the soil itself changes, partly under the influence of the plant process itself. The vegetation remains neither uniform nor inactive. Among the many trees, bushes and grasses, spread out in front of us or towering above us, we see a variety of species. We see that homogeneous breeds are in some interaction with each other, either helping each other in the fight against other breeds, or, on the contrary, fighting among themselves for access to land, air, moisture, and sunlight. We see that plants loosen the rocky soil and prepare the black soil, subsequently being displaced from the improved soil by other species. We see changes in the kingdoms of different species: in some centuries the spaces in front of us were occupied by oak. then the oak could no longer exist, and its forests were replaced by pine or spruce, which, after a long period of dominance, also began to wither away and were replaced by birch or aspen, etc. Thus, we notice something like the history of various plant kingdoms, and a picture of their origin and shifts can be supplemented by even more complex cooperation or opposition of shrubs and grasses. Moving on to a more detailed observation of individual individuals, we will notice their methods of reproduction, we will see that in this respect there is both cooperation and mutual opposition; and in the search for ways to capture spaces to the greatest extent, we will see many different adaptations to circumstances. Some breeds push the sprouting of shoots from their roots to a powerful degree, suffocating everything else around them. trying to somehow grow and take root. Other breeds return seeds in immeasurable quantities, sometimes feathered with fluff and capable of being carried by the wind over the heads of neighbors for miles and tens of miles, etc. We will notice many other living conditions, development and relationships of this vegetation cover and, of course, we can understand the external the reasons why the phenomena we observe occur. But why and who needs this history, this struggle, this relationship of phenomena - we do not see and cannot understand, and we are little interested in this question, because we look from the outside, as observers of some world alien to us.

Exactly the same picture will be presented to us by the history of humanity, developing on the crust of the globe, enclosing it with a network of its tribes and settlements, extracting from the earth, water and air and from the bowels of the earth the materials it needs. We will see the emergence of family and tribal unions, the emergence and modification of races, the erection of cities, many forms of mutual struggle and cooperation between people. We will even see how crude hordes of savages develop into ever more refined and complex forms of societies, how people’s methods of obtaining the forces of nature multiply, how at first wild struggle reigns and is gradually replaced by a tribal, state, and world alliance.

From the material side, although the nature of the observed process is somewhat different, and its complexity is much greater, we still see the picture essentially the same as what we observed in the vegetation covering the globe. And, without a doubt, in a purely material sense, both of these processes [are] the struggle of living matter for its existence, the process of assimilation of dead substances of nature by living matter and the multiplication of individuals carrying out this process. This material side of the life of the human race not only exists, but it constitutes the main fund of history, its material content. Man lives in this material process, almost mechanically constructing in it his family, clan and state organization, which is similar in its fundamentals everywhere. Everywhere on the material background of life we see well-known economic phenomena, and in the material sense Karl Marx is right when he says that it is on the material economic process that further superstructures, social and cultural, are erected.

There is no doubt that humanity lives against this material background. If we relate to its history in the same external way as we are forced to relate to the consideration of the process of the plant kingdom that covers the Earth, then here too, in our understanding of the meaning of phenomena, we are forced to limit ourselves only to consideration of causes and consequences: why such and such a phenomenon arose did it arise under the influence of what conditions? There cannot be a question why this phenomenon was necessary; who needed it is unknown. But if we put up with such “agnosticism” when dealing with a nature that is alien to us, then we cannot come to terms with human history, in which we ourselves constantly set goals for ourselves and use conscious efforts to achieve them. That we set these goals on the basis of the material process of nature, that in achieving our goals we must in one way or another combine the conditions of this material process - we all know this well. But beyond this soil we see the sphere of our conscious and volitional life. It is embedded in the sphere of material conditions, but does not merge with them, constantly fights with them, very often defeats them, and in any case, it is the only thing that makes up what we feel with our life and the life of humanity. The sphere of material conditions is something external to us, although it envelops us. It has its own history for us, but only insofar as our inner sphere gives it direction. It controls us in appearance, but in our desires and goals it is only material for our activities.

Such an obvious relationship between these two spheres of our existence makes for us a very real question not only about the reason, but also about the purpose in our life, and, therefore, in the life of humanity. This concept of purpose, this question - “for what” - we introduce into the understanding of life and historical process, which is the only reason why a philosophical understanding of it can arise. It is this question that forms the subject of the following discussion.

I consider it necessary to make this preliminary explanation in order to show why I hardly dwell on the material conditions of the life of history and even on those manifestations of it in which - in a purely human organization - our volitional influence takes part, but which are all are fundamentally the generation of necessary material conditions. This area of history, and especially in our time, is being studied very diligently, often with great success, and, of course, the work of those who do this is quite necessary. But the sphere, so to speak, supramaterial, on the contrary, remains very neglected, abandoned, although it, to a small extent, should arouse attention to the same degree. It is this side of the historical process, which is closely connected with the fate of each individual person, that the following study intends to focus on. I repeat, this separation of the supramaterial, volitional sphere into a special study does not in the least deny the material process, the process of the necessary. We will touch it sometimes. But the immediate content of the following pages is the sphere of consciousness, will, and goals. According to the author, only it shows us the philosophy of history, shows the beginning and end of the historical process, its conscious volitional goals and the various vicissitudes of that spiritual struggle that makes up the meaning of human history from the very beginning of human life to the end of it, after the exhaustion of everything that constitutes the goal the origin, content and final end of this life.

Section I. Spiritual struggle in history

1.Philosophy of history and religion

In philosophical knowledge we strive to understand the inner meaning of the process of our study, and this task in relation to the history of mankind leads us to bring a religious point of view into the field of observation historical events. Historical science will give us information about the path and under the influence of what external conditions humanity developed. But external knowledge of the external course of phenomena alone is not capable of satisfying our demands regarding such an evolution in which the human spirit, consciousness, and personality are manifested. The question of the meaning of such a process inevitably [leads] to the same questions that confront us in relation to our personal lives. A person asks himself: why did he come into the world, what will he leave it with, what connects the beginning of life, its course and its end? These questions also arise before us when thinking about the collective life of people. Personal life and collective life are so closely connected with each other that we cannot understand them without illuminating personal life with social conditions and social conditions - with the properties of the individual.

Refusing this, we would have to come to the conclusion that history has absolutely no rational meaning, that is, the goals of its beginning, middle and end. It turns into a soulless process of nature, in which we can somehow only trace the sequence of causes and effects, which began unknown why and lead unknown to what, and, in any case, alien to conscious intentionality. But a consciously living person cannot reconcile himself with such a view. Even when we give up our exhausted hands when we fail to grasp the meaning of events, we do not rest for long in this cognitive despair, and at the slightest opportunity to find some data for judgment, humanity again rushes to the eternal question of the goals of life, the goals of history.

This persistence of our consciousness is completely legitimate, for, reconciling ourselves with the impossibility of understanding the goals of life, we would condemn ourselves to the unconsciousness of existence, and therefore would have to renounce everything high in our personality and admit that there is no difference between high and low. The question of what is high and noble and what is low and vile depends entirely on the goals of life. What would be high for some purposes will have to be considered absurd for other purposes. We can evaluate our personality and our development only in relation to certain goals of world life, and if they do not exist or if we do not know them, then there is no personal meaningful life, and therefore there is no precisely that for which it is worth live.

That is why humanity has never been able to come to terms with ignorance of the goals of personal and world life, which are completely inseparable. People have always shaken themselves after moments of cognitive despair, and this comes out all the more natural because the recognition of the inaccessibility of the goals of life for us is in fact completely unfounded and arises only as a result of the arbitrary assumption that we have the only way of cognition - precisely based on the testimony of our external senses. But in addition to this knowledge, which is called mediocre (obtained through the external sense organs), we also have internal knowledge, which is called direct, that is, obtained without the mediation of these organs.

Lev Tikhomirov Religious and philosophical foundations of history

M. Smolin. The comprehensive ideal of Lev Tikhomirov

Preface

Section I. Spiritual struggle in history

1. Philosophy of history and religion

2. Life goals and religious knowledge

3. God-seeking and Revelation

4. Approaching the Personal God and the idea of the Kingdom of God

5. Removal from God the Creator and human autonomy

6. Historical development of basic religious and philosophical ideas

Division II. Pagan era

7. General character of paganism

8. Dispersion of the Deity in nature

9. Downplaying the concept of deity

10. The moral influence of paganism

11. Mysticism

12. Pagan philosophy of existence

13. The trend of irreligion

14. God-seeking of the classical world

15. Evolutionary potential of the idea of paganism

Division III. Revelation of the Supercreative Creator

16. Election of Israel

17. The Rise and Fall of Israel

18. Israel Mission

19. New Testament Revelation

20. The originality of the Christian teaching about God the Word

21. Legend of Christian esotericism

Division IV. Syncretic teachings

22. The meaning of syncretism

23. Gnosticism

24. Extra-Christian syncretism (Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, Manichaeism)

25. The emergence of Kabbalah

26. Kabbalistic worldview

27. Practical Kabbalah

28. General meaning of Kabbalah

Section V. Christian era

29. New Revelation. Life in Christ

30. Victory of Christianity

31. Development of dogma

32. Church and monasticism

33. Christian statehood

34. The coercive element in the history of Christianity

35. Christian culture

Section VI. Islam

Section VII. New Testament Israel

41. The fate of the Jews "golusa" (dispersion)

42. Jewish creation of the kingdom of Israel

43. Jews in Christendom

44. Jews in Turkey

45. The era of Jewish equality, or the Emancipation of the Jews

46. Organization and government of the Jews

47. Two Israels

Section VIII. Secret teachings and societies

Section IX. The Resurrection of Pagan Mysticism and Economic Materialism

Section X. Completing the circle of world evolution

63. Eschatological teaching

64. General character of contemplations and revelations

65. Old Testament prophecies

66. Millennial Kingdom (chiliasm)

67. Seven New Testament eras

68. The beginning of New Testament history

69. In the desert of the world

70. About the “retreat”, about the one who “detains” him and about the adulterous wife

71. End Times

@ Publication by the editors of the magazine "Moscow". 1997

The comprehensive ideal of Lev Tikhomirov

The name of the outstanding thinker Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov (1852-1923) still remains a mystery for Russian society. And many people are not familiar with it at all.

Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov was born on January 19, 1852 in the military fortification of Gelendzhik in the Caucasus, in the family of a military doctor. After graduating from the Kerch Alexander Gymnasium with a gold medal, he entered the Imperial Moscow University in 1870, where he fell into the circle of Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries. In 1873, L. A. Tikhomirov was arrested and convicted in the case of the “193s”. He spends more than four years in the Peter and Paul Fortress. In 1878, in January, L. A. Tikhomirov was released, leaving him under administrative supervision with his parents. But already in October of the same year, he secretly left his parents’ home and went underground to continue his revolutionary activities. At this time, he was already a member of "Land and Freedom", striving to carry out a coup d'etat with the aim of convening the Constituent Assembly or establishing a revolutionary dictatorship (depending on the prevailing circumstances).

All this time L.A. Tikhomirov had to wander around Russia. In the fall of 1882, wanting to avoid arrest, he went abroad - first to Switzerland and then to France. Here, in the spring of 1883, he, together with Lavrov, began publishing the Bulletin of Narodnaya Volya. Finding himself in the republican “advanced” France and having seen enough of parliamentary scandals, having become acquainted with the activities of party politicians, L. A. Tikhomirov begins to reconsider his political views. “From now on,” he writes in 1886, “we need to expect only from Russia, the Russian people, expecting almost nothing from revolutionaries... Accordingly, I began to reconsider my life. I must arrange it in such a way as to be able to to serve Russia as my instinct tells me, regardless of any parties" (Memoirs of Lev Tikhomirov. M., 1927).

Comparing a weak France, torn by party strife (constantly “offended” by the German Empire) with a strong, stable Russian Empire, ruled by the firm hand of Emperor Alexander III, Tikhomirov draws conclusions not in favor of the former and not in favor of the democratic principle of power.

In parallel with political changes in the self-awareness of L. A. Tikhomirov, religious changes also occurred. The lukewarm attitude towards faith was replaced by an ardent desire to revive the Orthodox man within himself, which strengthened his conscious decision to break with the revolution. One day he opened the Gospel on the lines: “And he delivered him from all his sorrows, and gave him wisdom and the favor of the king of Egypt, Pharaoh.” Again and again Lev Alexandrovich opened the Gospel, and each time the Gospel lines appeared before him. Tikhomirov gradually developed the idea that God was showing him the way - to turn to the Tsar with a request for mercy.

L. A. Tikhomirov became the first Russian thinker to develop the doctrine of Russian statehood, its essence and the conditions of its action. He was the first to seriously study such a state phenomenon as the Russian autocracy. The state is the natural union of the nation. “The only institution,” says the researcher, “capable of combining both freedom and order, is the state” (“Workers and the State.” St. Petersburg, 1908. P. 34). One of the most characteristic and basic properties of a person is his desire for relationships with other people. A person's sociality is the same instinct as his instinct to fight for his existence. Both of them are natural because they come from human nature itself. The state is the highest form of society. Society evolves from family and tribal unions to class unions, and with the development of human needs and interests it grows to the emergence of a higher power that unites all social groups of society - the state.

The choice of the principle of Supreme Power depends on the moral and psychological state of the nation, on those ideals that shaped the nation’s worldview. If “a certain all-encompassing ideal of morality is alive and strong in a nation,” L. A. Tikhomirov further develops his thought, “leading everyone in everything to the readiness of voluntary submission to oneself, then a monarchy appears, because in this case the supreme dominance of a moral ideal does not require the action of force physical (democratic), there is no need to search for and interpret this ideal (aristocracy), but only the best constant expression of it is needed, which an individual person as a morally rational being is most capable of, and this person must only be placed in complete independence from all external influences, capable of disturbing the balance of her judgment from a purely ideal point of view" ("Monarchical Statehood". P. 69).

On Stolypin's instructions, he wrote several notes on the history of the labor movement and relations between the state and workers. L. A. Tikhomirov also wrote notes on the religious policy of the state, on the convening of the Church Council. Tikhomirov's church-journalistic activity was, in particular, one of the motivating reasons for the preparation of church reform by Emperor Nicholas II. The Emperor, having read his work “The Requests of Life and Our Church Government” (1903), ordered the Holy Synod to discuss the issue of convening a Church Council. In 1906, the Pre-Conciliar Presence met, in which, by order of the Highest, L. A. Tikhomirov also participated.

After the death of the editor-publisher of Moskovskie Vedomosti, Professor Budilovich, L. A. Tikhomirov took up (1909) editing and publishing the oldest monarchist newspaper. According to the initial agreement with the Ministry of Internal Affairs (to whose department the newspaper belonged), the new editor was supposed to publish Moskovskie Vedomosti until the end of 1918; but the contract could not be fully implemented by the ministry due to financial difficulties. L. A. Tikhomirov refuses to rent the newspaper at the end of 1913.

Apparently, L. A. Tikhomirov’s interest in the philosophy of history and religion arose long before he freed himself from journalistic activities. L. A. Tikhomirov sometimes published his articles on church issues in spiritual magazines. In 1907, he published reflections on the Apocalypse under the title “Apocalyptic Doctrine of the Fates and the End of the World” (January book of the Missionary Review); in the same year, the magazine “Christian” published an article “On the Seven Apocalyptic Churches.” Already in these two works it is easy to recognize the ideas underlying the eschatological reflections of the tenth section of the “Religious and Philosophical Foundations of History.”

After finishing the editorship of Moskovskie Vedomosti, L. A. Tikhomirov settled in Sergiev Posad (where he died on October 10, 1923). Proximity to the Moscow Theological Academy leads to acquaintance with its teachers - A. I. Vvedensky, M. D. Muretov, whose works he refers to in his new book. A certain connection between Tikhomirov’s religious and historical work can also be seen with the activities of the “Circle of Those Seeking Christian Enlightenment in the Spirit of the Orthodox Church of Christ” by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Novoselov. The Novoselovskaya “Religious and Philosophical Library” published two works by L. A. Tikhomirov: “Personality, Society and the Church” (1904) and “Christian Love and Altruism” (1905). In 1916-1918, the philosopher read several reports in the auditorium of the “Religious and Philosophical Library” (in the apartment of M. A. Novoselov, opposite the Cathedral of Christ the Savior). The topics of Tikhomirov's reports - "On Gnosticism", "On Logos and Philo of Alexandria", "On the Philosophy of Kabbalah", "On the Philosophy of Vedanta", "On Mohammedan Mysticism" - correspond to many chapters of the book "Religious and Philosophical Foundations of History". And in the manuscript of the book there are references to the works of two participants in the “Circle of Those Seeking Christian Enlightenment in the Spirit of the Orthodox Church of Christ” - V. A. Kozhevnikov and S. N. Bulgakov. It is quite possible that the publication of “Religious and Philosophical Foundations of History” was supposed to be carried out in the Novoselovsky series of the “Religious and Philosophical Library”.

The basis of Tikhomirov’s book was the idea of the struggle in the human world between two worldviews: dualistic and monistic. The dualistic worldview recognizes the existence of two beings - the Being of God and the created being created by God. The monistic worldview asserts, in contrast, the unity of everything that exists, preaching the idea of a self-existent nature. Throughout human history, these ideas have waged an irreconcilable spiritual struggle among themselves, never dying, never mixing with each other, despite numerous attempts to syncretize them.

L. Tikhomirov’s book is devoted to analyzing the history of this spiritual struggle. It is all the more modern because it speaks not only about the past and present periods of this struggle, but also provides an analysis of human history in its last eschatological times. Tikhomirov’s book is also unique in that it is the first time in Russian that human history has been fully analyzed from a religious point of view. Tikhomirov's philosophical work shows the logical development of religious movements in human societies, the mutual connection and continuity of religious ideas of different times, which either disappear from the historical scene or appear again, donning new guises. “The Kingdom of the world becomes the Kingdom of the Lord,” writes L. A. Tikhomirov. “Everything created comes to the harmony in which it was created.”

Mikhail SMOLIN

Preface

If we look at the history of mankind from a purely materialistic point of view, that is, as an outside observer, unable or unwilling to understand any inner meaning of the process taking place before us, we will see something reminiscent of the history of the geology of the Earth or the history of the plant and animal kingdom.

For long millennia, or tens, or even hundreds of thousands of years, the crust of the globe is covered with a changing carpet of plants. The picture does not remain unchanged before us. Delving into its changes, we will notice many well-known laws of its existence. The action of the Sun and the earth's atmosphere changes, the amount of moisture changes, the soil itself changes, partly under the influence of the plant process itself. The vegetation remains neither uniform nor inactive. Among the many trees, bushes and grasses, spread out in front of us or towering above us, we see a variety of species. We see that homogeneous breeds are in some interaction with each other, either helping each other in the fight against other breeds, or, on the contrary, fighting among themselves for access to land, air, moisture, and sunlight. We see that plants loosen the rocky soil and prepare the black soil, subsequently removing other species from the improved soil. We see changes in the kingdoms of different species: in some centuries the spaces in front of us were occupied by oak. then the oak could no longer exist, and its forests were replaced by pine or spruce, which, after a long period of dominance, also began to wither away and were replaced by birch or aspen, etc. Thus, we notice something like the history of various plant kingdoms, and a picture of their origin and shifts can be supplemented with even more complex ones involving the cooperation or resistance of shrubs and grasses. Moving on to a more detailed observation of individual individuals, we will notice their methods of reproduction, we will see that in this respect there is both cooperation and mutual opposition; and in searching for ways to capture space to the greatest extent, we will see many different adaptations to circumstances. Some breeds push the sprouting of shoots from their roots to a powerful degree, suffocating everything else around them. trying to somehow grow and take root. Other breeds return seeds in immeasurable quantities, sometimes feathered with fluff and capable of being carried by the wind over the heads of neighbors for miles and tens of miles, etc. We will notice many other conditions of life, development and relationships of this vegetation cover and, of course, we can understand external reasons why the phenomena we observe arise. But why and who needs this history, this struggle, this relationship of phenomena - we do not see and cannot understand, and we are little interested in this question, because we look from the outside, as observers of some world alien to us.

Such an obvious relationship between these two spheres of our existence makes for us a very real question not only about the reason, but also about the purpose in our life, and, therefore, in the life of humanity. We introduce this concept of purpose, this question - “for what” - into the understanding of the life and historical process, which is the only reason why a philosophical understanding of it can arise. It is this question that forms the subject of the following discussion.

I consider it necessary to make this preliminary explanation in order to show why I hardly dwell on the material conditions of the life of history and even on those manifestations of it in which - in a purely human organization - our volitional influence takes part, but which are all are fundamentally the generation of necessary material conditions. This area of history, and especially in our time, is being studied very diligently, often with great success, and, of course, the work of those who do this is quite necessary. But the sphere, so to speak, supra-material, on the contrary, remains very neglected, abandoned, although it, to a small extent, should arouse attention to the same degree. It is this side of the historical process, which is closely connected with the fate of each individual person, that the following study intends to focus on. I repeat, this separation of the supra-material, volitional sphere into a special study does not in the least deny the material process, the process of the necessary. We will touch it sometimes. But the immediate content of the following pages is the sphere of consciousness, will, and goals. According to the author, only it shows us the philosophy of history, shows the beginning and end of the historical process, its conscious volitional goals and the various vicissitudes of that spiritual struggle that makes up the meaning of human history from the very beginning of human life to the end of it, after the exhaustion of everything that constitutes the goal the origin, content and final end of this life.

Philosophy of history and religion

In philosophical knowledge we strive to understand the inner meaning of the process of our study, and this task in relation to the history of mankind leads us to bring a religious point of view into the field of observation of historical events. Historical science will give us information about the path and under the influence of what external conditions humanity developed. But external knowledge of the external course of phenomena alone is not capable of satisfying our demands regarding such an evolution in which the human spirit, consciousness, and personality are manifested. The question of the meaning of such a process inevitably [leads] to the same questions that confront us in relation to our personal lives. A person asks himself: why did he come into the world, what will he leave it with, what connects the beginning of life, its course and its end? These questions also arise before us when thinking about the collective life of people. Personal life and collective life are so closely connected that we cannot understand them without illuminating personal life by social conditions and social conditions by the properties of the individual.

That is why humanity has never been able to come to terms with ignorance of the goals of personal and world life, which are completely inseparable. People have always shaken themselves after moments of cognitive despair, and this comes out all the more natural because the recognition of the inaccessibility of the goals of life for us is in fact completely unfounded and is only due to the arbitrary assumption that we have the only way of cognition - precisely based on the testimony of our external senses. But in addition to this knowledge, which is called mediocre (obtained through the external sense organs), we also have internal knowledge, which is called direct, that is, obtained without the mediation of these organs.

External objective knowledge, notes P. E. Astafiev, tells us not about the internal essence of an object, but only about how it is determined by external relations to what is outside it... But is all our knowledge like this? Is it true that what we really know and what is vitally necessary for us to know is given to our thought under the condition of an external and independent objectivity, cognizable by us only in parts, in an external phenomenon, phenomenally and critically? For example, not under this condition we are given our own being, our own “I”, our own will, moving causes, ultimate goals, principles and ideals... We know all this but essentially, internally, directly. Without such direct knowledge of our inner world, will would be impossible, and our “I” would not exist. The subject's knowledge of himself is drawn by him exclusively from the inner world given to internal experience, and no knowledge of external objects and their external relations nothing can be added to this knowledge.

I do not consider it possible to accept the terms “essential knowledge” and “phenomenal knowledge” used by P. E. Astafiev. But the question here is posed absolutely correctly. We have one way of knowing: external and internal. Internal knowledge is fundamental. Without it, we could not attach any real meaning to external knowledge. Our “I”, our consciousness, will - all this is cognized only by internal perception. And if there is consciousness, will and feeling in the world, then we can cognize them only in the same way as we cognize our “I,” that is, based on internal mental perception. And this brings us to the introduction religious idea to the tasks of cognition.

The religious idea consists in recognizing the connection of man with that Highest conscious and guiding element of the world, which we call the Divine and in which, due to the presence of consciousness and will in it, we can seek the goals of the life of the world. The inner consciousness of man says that just as we cognize our personality directly, we can cognize the Divine with the same direct perception. Just as in self-knowledge the unity of the cognizing subject with the cognitive object occurs, so in the knowledge of the Divine the unity of the cognizing subject (that is, man) with the cognitive object (God) can occur.

Here we enter the realm of faith. Many people don't believe it, and that's their right. But unbelief is usually based on the fact that God is not shown by our objective knowledge, that God is not revealed by the organs of our external senses. This basis of unbelief can no longer be recognized by reason. The external sense organs detect only phenomena of a physical nature. If these organs do not detect God, then the only reasonable conclusion that follows from this is that God is not one of the objects of nature, but not that He does not exist at all. Using the objective method of cognition, we cannot discover the existence of our personality, that is, its will and consciousness. But it does not follow from this that our “I” does not exist. The existence of our personality is affirmed by our inner consciousness and is not subject to any challenge, since this consciousness is the only criterion for the reliability of all sources of knowledge. This is our primary and basic knowledge. Exact science cannot further enter into the discussion of such issues, because to deny and prove something means to discuss the doubtful on the basis of what is certain. Therefore, there can be no question of proving the reality of something primary, which is the only basis for any further proofs or denials. If we recognized the unreliability of our immediate consciousness of our “I”, then this would mean. Moreover, the unreliability of the testimony of the senses, and, consequently, of all objects and natural phenomena that we know about through the testimony of these senses.

A person may not believe in God, but must understand that this disbelief has no evidence for itself: it is not the result of any knowledge, but simply an atheistic faith. Moreover, if we do not admit the existence of God or the possibility of being in connection with Him (religion), then we must, of course, abandon any philosophy of history. Subject knowledge indicates only the external connection of phenomena. Goals can generally be known only in will and consciousness. Therefore, we cannot find out the goals of history and its philosophy in any other way than by introducing evidence into the solution of the question. religious knowledge.

Of course, these readings may be inaccurate or misinterpreted. They can be viewed critically, they can be checked, compared, etc. But we can seek knowledge of goals only in the field of religious testimony. It has always made clear to people the meaning of their personal and world life. On this basis there were and are many mutual bickering and disagreements, but still people could not do without using this source of their knowledge.

However, in the circumstance that we are forced to resort to this source of knowledge, there is nothing that our cognizing mind could regret. It is extremely useful for epistemology that we have two different ways of cognition: internal, immediate, and external, objective. This duality contributes to the accuracy of cognition. Touching upon various aspects of the same circumstance or object, our external and internal knowledge can be mutually replenished and can provide considerations for critical verification of the evidence of external and internal observation. As P.E. Astafiev very interestingly proves this in the above-quoted work (“Faith and Knowledge...”), we, having as the primary method of cognition only the immediate, designed to understand an object according to its internal content, have ourselves created external cognition precisely for in order to see what objects are like in their external phenomena and relationships.

The method of knowledge on which faith is based, that is, direct perception, is not rejected in the total sum of knowledge, but is only supplemented by the objective method of recognition.

Likewise, with regard to the goals of personal life and the historical process, the indications of religion are significantly supplemented by external data. historical science. But we can still enter the field of philosophy of history only if we are convinced of the need for evidence not only of external, called exact, knowledge, but also of knowledge that is based on religious grounds.

This last knowledge is based on the connection and communication of man with the Divine, with the Highest active and creative principle, in which we can only gain any information about the basic problems of existence. The instructions flowing from this source are called revelation. Throughout their historical lives, people have used actual or supposed revelation. But, as we know, the revelations were numerous and far from identical. This is precisely what raises doubts about the reality of revelation in general. However, such doubt is completely unfounded, because in reality - in the diversity of revelations - we only receive more durable ways to understand the meaning of life.

That some of them are incorrect and do not actually belong to the Divine or do not belong to the Divine is quite obvious, since revelations do not tell a person the same thing. But when examining them, we are convinced that the naked mind is capable of critical analysis in this area, as a result of which, discarding the erroneous and illusory, we, however, see the more firmly the nature of superhuman revelation in other messages from this single source. If humanity had only one revelation, its thought could not consciously perceive truths, its mind would fall silent in the presence of testimony from above, but would not be imbued with conscious trust. On the contrary, given the position of the sources of religious knowledge, we are forced to seek conscious conviction in where the voice of real truth sounds and where there is a deception of human conjecture or even a malicious forgery. The result is trust, but a conscious one, strengthened by the reasonable rejection of everything erroneous and falsified.

Such a search for true revelation is necessary, because only true. an unmistakable revelation indicates the meaning of being, the meaning of life, and, consequently, the goals of our personal life, the nature of the development that we must give ourselves, and accordingly, our assessments of world history are determined, assessments of what in it should be recognized as great, fulfilling goals of world life, and what, on the contrary, should be considered as violating these goals, leading them astray from the path of implementation, and therefore harmful for a person’s personal development and for the fulfillment of his world mission. In this analysis, we first enter into a premonition that world life is an area of great struggle in which the destinies of mankind were decided and are being decided, not only what people themselves want to be and what they desire for themselves, but what the Higher forces of universal existence set as the goal of world life, the goal for which people received this particular nature and abilities, and not any other.

Thus, the religious idea, which brings with it the search for revelation, is necessary for the philosophy of history. Without any idea of the action of some Higher conscious and guiding force, it is unthinkable to search for the meaning of history. The general picture of world life, even with the help of this light, is still not easy to understand. The facts that make up this life are extremely complex and, as it were, fragmentary. We see millennia passing by millennia human life, of which very little remains for posterity. People work, struggle, look for ways to satisfy their various needs, organize their societies and states, and in all this work they have in mind their immediate goals, mostly lower material needs, and if over this work there is still an idea about the general meaning of life, then in the vast majority of cases people wander around this issue in semi-darkness. They express their achievements to it (the general meaning) most often in the form of difficult-to-understand symbols, in mythological ideas, and even philosophical ideas are often clothed in figurative forms and terms, the exact meaning of which is forgotten by subsequent generations. A long thousand-year process, developing in different countries, under different conditions, among different races, with different languages, difficult to understand in itself, becomes even more mysterious due to the paucity of materials left behind by obsolete peoples. Despite the enormous efforts of historical science and its sometimes unexpectedly amazing successes in understanding the distant past, we would be completely unable to grasp the general meaning of this life if we did not have the help of a religious idea in the lives of people of the past and in our own spiritual abilities. It throws light on the past, present and even the future.

The development and struggle of ideas occurs not only in the minds of people, but also in their very lives - personal, social and political. What we consider in philosophical reasoning as the content of ideas, in the history of mankind is the struggle of nations, classes, states, cultures. This does not depend on the fact that ideas, as other philosophers thought, were the real essence of being, but because the real essence of being is reflected equally, on the one hand, in the feelings and aspirations of people, in the entire structure of their lives, in their struggle social and political, and on the other hand - in ideas. Ideas constitute an abstract formulation of those forces that interact with each other in life. But it is easier to consider the content and relationship of religious and philosophical ideas than to grasp the immense complexity of historical events. Those who see religious and philosophical knowledge as something abstract and not relevant in life are mistaken. practical significance. Vice versa, philosophical knowledge gives us the true key to the knowledge of historical evolution.

Life goals and religious knowledge

People brought up on a non-religious worldview see in history only the struggle of human interests in the narrowest sense, and the possibility of the influence of other factors, human and superhuman, seems incredible to them and, in any case, not amenable to visual accounting. This view is extremely narrow.

We know the influence of extra-human factors on history even in the purely material sphere. We know that the influences of nature, independent of man, provide certain frameworks for his life and activity, but they are not irsideshi. Everyone recognizes this as quite natural. Skepticism raises its voice only in relation to whether, among the influences outside of man, there is anything emanating from Divine purposes?

But the question here comes down to this: is there any influence of the Supreme Principle, the Supreme World Power, in the life of man and humanity? We see and undoubtedly admit the influence of secondary forces on history: climatic, geological conditions, the relationship between land and sea space, the direction of river flow, etc. Pure materialists, who do not recognize anything in reality except physical forces, of course, cannot take into account nothing above them. But ignoring the operation of Divine power is remarkably inconsistent among those historians who acknowledge the existence of our spiritual powers and the existence of the Divine. Is it possible to assume that only the Highest Power, the Highest Principle are deprived of the ability to exert any decisive influence on the events of life? Reason, of course, compels us to say that the Highest Power must also have the highest influence. But if so, then, of course, we must look for this Higher Principle, the Higher Power, we must try to understand their tendencies, their guiding action in order to somehow conform to them. And we can only look for this in history in the same way as we look for it in our own biography.

Anyone who does not see manifestations of the Higher Personal Power in the experiences of his own personality and in the events of his personal life, of course, will not see them in human history. But anyone who notices in his life the action of some Supreme Superhuman Being cannot help but allow the same manifestations in the lives of other people and, consequently, in their collectivity, in their successive historical life. This is, of course, a subjective approach to an objective fact. But the beginning of all knowledge is subjective. The knowledge that is given to us by external senses is also subjective at its starting points. It seems to me that I see, hear, smell, touch, but all these are subjective sensations. Even the reference to the fact that other people see and hear the same thing is only a subjective assumption. The most objective test of all such subjective certainties is the fulfillment of the predictions made on the basis of them. But with an extreme degree of skepticism, here too the question may arise: was the fulfillment of the assumptions actually carried out in external objects or does it constitute an assumption of the subjective play of the same states of consciousness on the basis of which the prediction was made?

We should not [discuss] the question of life, of being, unless we take it as an axiom that the testimony of our external senses and internal, so-called direct perception have at least relative reliability, that is, they provide real knowledge, even if not infallible. Without this axiom, intelligent, conscious life is impossible for us.

The assumption of such an axiom is sometimes considered incredible on the grounds that at the same time we must allow the possibility of the penetration of our inner “I” into the external form and, on the contrary, the penetration of things of the higher world into the sphere of our inner “I”. However, such penetration is evidenced by our entire life, all its phenomena. So, for example, pedagogy takes great care that children from early childhood are surrounded by good impressions, so that nothing vile or immoral is imprinted on the child’s mind. Is such pedagogical concern senseless? Of course not. Meanwhile, if external impressions did not penetrate us and if external phenomena were only products of the mind of the “cognitive subject” (in this case, an infant), then, of course, there would be no need to worry about the purity of external impressions. Every decent politician, every military leader, and anyone generally dealing with human psychology knows what external impressions acting on us from outside mean. But all this practice proves that the external sphere and its objects, firstly, really exist, and secondly, they really act on our “I”, and vice versa - our “I” acts on the objects of the external world. To make this possible, of course, we need some kind of ability for mutual penetration of our “I” and objects of the external sphere. And don’t all our conversations with each other, all communication consist in the mutual penetration of subjects, mostly through the medium of material “things”? This penetration gives knowledge.

There is no doubt that this knowledge is not infallible. We mistake, for example, at dusk some stump in the forest for a wolf, etc. Illusions are a constant phenomenon. But we “create” these illusions, by the way, also from the material of external impressions.

There is a lot of subjectivity in the fact of cognition of objects. But it cannot be proven that a thing located outside of us is not approximately the same as we perceive it to be. For example, we perceive the color red. Physics tells us that in reality it is nothing more than a known sum of vibrations of matter or a known form of energy tension. But on what basis can one assert that these vibrations or tension were a real phenomenon, and the red color was only apparent? The vibration of particles is only a physical explanation of the phenomenon, but this does not mean that redness did not exist as real as these vibrations. Why can we say that vibration is an objective phenomenon, and color, harmony, beauty are only subjective, created by us? This is unprovable, it is pure speculation. On the contrary, it can be argued no less strongly that all our impressions in general convey to us with greater or less accuracy the real properties of things and phenomena. It is quite possible to think that it is not our sense organs that create the properties of objects, but on the contrary: sense organs appeared to us because objects have many different properties that cannot be grasped by one organ. This may also result in the need for a variety of organs of perception, for if only the vibration of particles were real, then only one sense organ would be sufficient for us to perceive it.

But if we are armed with any reliable tools of external and internal knowledge, then the existence of the Supreme non-human Being, that is, God, is no less reliable than the existence of the physical world. Indeed, how to answer the question: is there a being outside of us that has our psychological properties, sensations, consciousness, reason, will? If we answered in the negative, it would mean that we consider ourselves to be completely exceptional creatures in all of nature, having no analogy in the whole world. On what basis can one make such a generally strange assumption? The opposite answer is much more logical. Our psychological states are the only phenomena of the world outside and inside us that we know with certainty. Everything in the world can be a game of our consciousness, but consciousness itself exists, for otherwise there would be no illusions. If so, then we would have much more rights, together with all ancient philosophy, conclude that all matter is hylozoistic, that is, imbued with living properties, the same as ourselves. A more careful observation of the evidence of our internal perception reveals the one-sidedness of this solution to the question and leads to a distinction between the categories of creaturely, created, and original being. But in any case, with all analyzes of existence, we must admit that the properties of personality that we perceive in ourselves exist somewhere and outside of us, in other personal beings of the world. And at the same time, logic leads to the recognition that in the categories of phenomena of personal, psychological existence there must be some kind of Supreme Principle, a Supreme Being, in the field of action of which we must assume goals, and not a simple connection of mechanical causes and consequences. We see this in ourselves. We may be very weakly able to bring our goals to fruition, but we do nothing without some purpose. We always strive to achieve something that we ourselves set as a goal. There is no doubt, therefore, that the Higher Power, possessing the properties of reason and will, in the same way puts goals into the actions it performs.

And we cannot help but consider this Supreme Intelligent Being as the Creator of all completeness or, at least, its organizer. In nature we see powerful forces, but in the volitional sense passive, inert, following only the conditions of the movement embedded in them. Any creative role can only be characteristic of someone who has reason and will, and in the actions of a rational and volitional being there are always goals. Our forces at the disposal of nature are relatively small, but we know that we always have goals of influence, and this increases our power so much that the immeasurably enormous passive forces of nature obey us, do what we want. Can there be even the slightest doubt that the Supreme Mind, which created or even just arranged the world, also put its goals into it, wanted and wants to achieve something and, therefore, achieves it, as we achieve within the limits of our small forces?

But this Higher Power is also the highest principle of our being, the source of those psychological forces that we possess, that consciousness, that will that we feel in ourselves. She cannot not invest her goals not only in dead nature, but also in our lives. Thus, we come to the conviction that life and everything conscious and unconscious in it is imbued with the goals set by the Primary Source of life. Having reached such a conviction, we cannot help but ask ourselves about these goals.

Knowledge of these goals of world life, not set by us, but within the framework of which we have to set our own goals, is obviously a burning and urgent question. We want to burn, we want to set goals for ourselves and achieve them. But at the same time, we become one way or another in relation to those world goals that are established by the Supreme Source. Even if we did not yet intend to identify our goals with His goals, then knowing them, in any case, is necessary for taking into account what stands in our way. However, in addition, inner self-consciousness tells us a presentiment that the Supreme Being is a Being full of goodness and goodwill towards us. Knowing His plans becomes even more important in this case.

In total, as we see, since ancient times the thought of these above-emanating goals of life has gripped a person with irresistible force. The questions of self-knowledge are also closely related to their knowledge, for the content of the question, what is “I”, includes the question of why I live and where I am going. Of course, people do not give themselves to these requests with the same intensity of search. There are more subtle and sensitive natures - and more rude and superficial natures. Moreover, the content of our psychology does not mature to the same degree of harmony of its individual aspects. In every this moment That's why we see a lot of people. as if cold and alien to interest in this higher knowledge. But for most of us, sooner or later the turn comes to see before us questions about the highest goals of existence and our personal lives. This is a universal phenomenon, and even exceptions to it often show not so much a lack of spiritual needs as a certain despair in the face of difficulties in solving them. And indeed, resolving them is not easy, mainly because it is possible only on the basis of religious knowledge.

Religious knowledge, as requiring “penetration” into the Divine sphere, is born on the basis of internal perception, and this top and flower of human abilities is always cluttered in our consciousness with an ever-changing pile of external impressions, crushing it with their thick crust. Inner perception does not easily break through in order to feel contact with the psychic influences of the Higher World. This contact is generally considered possible only when our desire for it meets a reciprocal desire from the Upper World; and that connection with the Divine, which constitutes the essence of religion, is established not from the bottom up, not from man to God, but, on the contrary, from the top down, from the Divine to man, in response to the desire of the latter, which in itself is powerless to overcome the obstacles of external impressions The process of establishing this connection in general has, as historical experience shows, such a character, but in the subtleties of internal perception, he begins to feel that he cannot find the true goals of his life in the phenomena of the external world, and realizes that in order to solve the problem he must rise to the Source. He begins to strive for this, but cannot achieve it through his own efforts until, in response to his quest, a Hand from above reaches out to him. Then the moment of religious life comes and religious knowledge becomes possible, which reveals to us more or less. clarity of the purpose of the higher life and the ability to consciously live according to them.

This search for the meaning of personal and world life is the same as the search for God. The meaning of life and its goals lie in the Supreme Creative Power, which is God. What is God and does He exist? By resolving this question, we thereby learn the meaning of life. In the same way, having found the meaning of life, we thereby find God. The search for the meaning of life and the search for God are just different sides of the same psychological process.

God-seeking and Revelation

The process of self-knowledge of a person by natural properties leads him to search for the absolute beginning of those spiritual properties that he notices in himself. This is where the search for the Personal Highest Principle arises, which man calls God. Peering into himself, into his being, a person really comes to the conviction of the existence of a Personal God. He feels that he really exists and that the property of consciousness is inextricably linked with the fact of his existence. Without consciousness, I would not even know that I “am.” This consciousness manifests itself in thinking, as the old Cartesian saying “Cogito, ergo sum” says. It is equally clear that I have some reason, for without it I could not reason, I could not distinguish “I” from “not-I”. The existence of will is also clear in the soul, for without this ability I could not strive for anything. Even Leibniz established idea and desire as necessary properties of his “monad”. No aspiration would be possible if I did not have the ability of desire, that is, will. In total, introspection completely establishes the content of our “I”: I am a subject, completely separate from the surrounding world, conscious, reasoning, influencing the environment and perceiving influences, having strength and freedom, although restrained by the environment. Collectively, all this constitutes what we call personality.

At this first moment of introspection, a person may seem to himself to be something unusually high, as if divine, in comparison with other objects of the surrounding nature, in which we do not notice such properties. But with further self-observation, another moment sets in - bitterness and even despair, for all these high properties, which have an apparently absolute nature in their nature, a person notices in himself to such a relative degree that he begins to seem to himself some kind of insignificance in comparison with the high properties of his the same nature. He, inwardly so free, sees himself as comprehensively limited and subordinate, sees that he is not at all omnipotent, not infallible, and even completely unsatisfied in his wishes and aspirations.

It is this contradiction between the absoluteness of personality properties and the relativity of their manifestation in a person that leads to the conviction that there must be some kind of Being of the same personal properties, but in their absolute content, and that the human personality could not come from anywhere other than from this Being. My “I” - the relative expression of absolute properties - could not have come into being if there had not been their Absolute Source somewhere. This is how thought comes to God, after which the search for Him cannot but appear, since living a full life is unthinkable without connection with the fullness of personal existence. Without this, the personality is immersed in dissatisfaction. Therefore, there is a search for connection with the Absolute personal Being, that is, God.

The noted process of reaching God in no way constitutes the creation of God in our likeness, as many researchers of religions express it. Quite the contrary, here the consciousness speaks in a person that he himself was created in someone else’s image, that he is only the likeness of something Higher. Otherwise, it is impossible to explain one’s being, in which a person sees only the relative attributes of some higher absolute nature. The inner need does not at all lead to the creation of God in our likeness, which does not satisfy ourselves, but to the search for the very Source of Existence in the hope of receiving from Him the solution to our being, which contains a contradiction that is insoluble for the mind and feelings. And so a person is looking for whether there is a voice of this Source, this Creator, His Revelation, capable of indicating how to get in touch with Him? Our consciousness clearly says that only such a Revelation can show us the paths of life that correspond to the mysterious being.

At the same time, the thought irresistibly arises that if we are the likeness of the Creator, then the fullness of life can only be given to us by such a path of development that identifies the goals of the human personality with the goals of the Creator. If our goals do not go in harmony with His goals, then our life would become a self-search for our personality as a particle or echo of the Absolute Being of the Creator. But who can give us an idea of the goals He established, if not He Himself?

That He will respond to the quest is a necessary assumption. We know that we would respond, but could He be less good and responsive than us? The absence of a response would even make one doubt His existence, such silence is incredible, if only there is a God.

And Revelation really does appear. All religions agree on this, but these revelations on which they are based do not tell us the same thing, so that a new riddle appears before our minds: what is the real Voice of God, the real Revelation?

The totality of human cognitive abilities provides sufficient strength to understand this issue. Our mind is not at all so powerless that it cannot reach the truth. Of course, we must consider a real Revelation to be one that reveals something inaccessible to us on our own and at the same time does not make mistakes that are obvious to us in explaining any phenomena, does not reveal signs of the work of an ordinary human mind, but, on the contrary, reveals signs of a superhuman Mind that knows that , which people cannot know, clarifies to us our personality in its highest properties and indicates the goals of life, which we could not comprehend on our own. Considering with this criterion those teachings that different peoples and religions are considered divine revelations, we do not find among them a single one that has signs of the truly divine, except for the Moisse-Christian Revelation. In all other philosophies of existence there are obvious signs of the work of the human mind, sometimes very high, but always purely human.

Other religions usually begin with assurances of the incomprehensibility of God, and then analyze him in such detail, in all his elements, in the numerical relationships of forces, that absolutely nothing remains incomprehensible. And next to this subtle information about the essence of God, we see in their revelations the grossest errors, for example, in natural science, which would be unthinkable on the part of the Divine.

Hindus tell us about the revelations of “great souls” who have experienced many successive existences, reviewed all the secret places of existence many times, and sometimes even personally participated in the creation and organization of the world. But what absurdities these “great souls” tell us about everything that the Hindus could not know at the time of compiling these pseudo-revelations! Manu Swayambhu, for example, reports that small insects, like fleas, are born not from the “womb”, like mammals, and not from eggs, like other categories of animals, but “from warm moisture.”

But if this is the primary view of the infancy of observation of nature, then we have now known the embryology of insects for a long time. It becomes clear to us already from such mistakes that Manu Swayambhu did not create the world and was not well informed about the laws of nature.

In revelations ancient wisdom, inherited into modern occultism, and even earlier into Kabbalah, the stars are represented as divine beings and their organs of action, so that the planets and constellations have a huge influence on man and his destiny. Astrology examines all this in great detail, and Kabbalah calculates not only the days, but even the minutes in which we must turn to the star angels in order to receive from them everything we need, from the harvest to academic diplomas. But the divine beings who discovered all this wisdom, it turns out, did not even know the actual number of planets and do not give any spiritual role to those of them that were not known in ancient times, but were discovered by astronomy after the compilation of astrology. Today's occultists are forced to resort to the most unreliable tricks in order to whine out of such an embarrassing situation. “When Uranus and Neptune,” says the author of “The Light of Egypt,” “shone invisible in their distant skies, the human race as a whole was impenetrable to their action.” Now Thomas Henry Burgon is already determining their effect on humans. But it is not true that Uranus and Neptune are “invisible”. They were just as visible as they are now, that is, accessible to vision, as they would be now if our telescopes existed in Chaldea. But not through telescopes, and not only astronomers are affected by their rays? In the same way, among Kabbalists, Uranus and Neptune remain to this day without angels, without divine dignity and influence. It is absolutely clear that this pseudo-wisdom has no divine origin, for not only the Creator of the world, but also the angels have known the stars very well since the beginning of time, for if the stars are sometimes not visible to the naked eye from the Earth, then they should be perfectly known to the angels who have flown between them many times. Exactly like this

The human invention is also clear in relation to that supposed “heavenly alphabet”, with which the letters make up the constellations that make it possible to read all our destinies. The Deity could not communicate such a revelation, for He knows better than our modern astronomers that there are no constellations at all and that the stars, which appear from the Earth in the constant figures of the so-called constellations, are scattered in different parts of the world space without any relation to one another and do not constitute separate stellar systems, but represent an optical phenomenon that only appears from the Earth. Moreover, the very pattern of the constellations changes. IN Ursa Major, for example, of its seven stars, five move in one direction, and two in the completely opposite direction, so that the pattern of the constellation within 50,000 years should change beyond recognition, and within 100,000 years the constellation will completely disintegrate (Klein. Astronomical Evenings, Chapter XXVII ). Thus, the constellations cannot form 4”n-yp of the eternal celestial alphabet.

There are a lot of such particulars of unsuccessful revelations, the kind of which simply spoke to the human science of that time. But perhaps it is much more important to note that general concept about the world and about God, which is the same for all revelations except Christian, and which understands the world as an emanation from the Divine or identifies the world with the Divine. This is how the ancient Egyptians, Chaldeans, Hindus looked, and by their inheritance Kabbalah, occultism and modern theosophy. In revelations of this kind one can see an oscillation of thought between two assumptions: the world with all its objects and beings originated from the divine element, or, along with the Divinity as an organizer, an architect, there existed matter equal to it, from which the Divinity itself was born as a result of some vibration of particles ? But whether thought goes in one direction or another, one thing is clear: that for such a worldview there is no need for Divine Revelation, for the idea of pantheism and emanation is purely human. A person cannot imagine anything else when he tries to create a philosophy of existence, guided only by what he observes in the world around him. physical phenomena. The general idea of all these “revelations”, these philosophies of existence - among the Egyptians, Hindus, Kabbalists, etc. - is that “out of nothing nothing can be created.” Yogi Ramacharaka (“Zhnani Yoga”, p. 93), preaching Hinduism to the European public, very characteristically refuses to understand such an incongruity, so that “something” can be made from “nothing”. For him this is an axiom, as was generally the case in ancient world. This axiom was proclaimed by Lavoisier in chemistry: “Dans ba nature - rien ne se cree, rien ne se pcroc” (Out of nothing nothing arises). And of course, this is the law of matter. There is neither the creation of matter nor its destruction, but only transformation. Therefore, when the mind proceeds from the observation of the laws of matter, it can in no case admit the fact of creation. He knows only the generation of one phenomenon from another. The idea of creation could only appear from the Revelation of Him Who stands outside the laws of matter, Who Himself created matter, not in the sense that He made it out of nothing, but in the sense that in the place of nothing He created something, created some being there, where there was no existence. The Creator gave this being caused from non-existence certain laws, whatever He pleased, just as He could have created something completely different, with completely different laws. For the human mind, which has never observed such a creature, but knows only the generation, evolution and transformation of existing things, the idea of creating being in the place of non-existence is completely unthinkable, it could not have even occurred to him, it is, so to speak, absurd, contrary to everything that we know that we can think.

And that is why it is clear that all philosophies of existence that do not imagine the creation of the world from nothing are not revelations from above. They proceed from the understanding that is characteristic of man. In order to reason this way, no revelation is needed.

We can see revelation only in that extraordinary, unimaginable way of origin of us and the whole world, which we learned about from the teachings of the Moiss Christians. This is truly something that we could not recognize on our own, with our own minds. This extraordinaryness could only be communicated by the One who created the world. It is this singularity of Revelation that proves its divinity. Yet rational philosophies of being themselves reveal their complete alienation from anything other than forces human mind, by their very character show that they are not given by the Revelation of God.

The Mosaic-Christian revelation communicates something truly incomprehensible to reason. It does not tell us as verbosely as Kabbalah about the incomprehensibility of God, but it shows His incomprehensibility by this very act of creating everything out of nothing. The One who created the world out of nothing is, of course, incomprehensible. But this does not contradict human reason, if only reason takes into account the completely acceptable circumstance that the laws of our local, physical existence are not the only ones in the world and that there are other norms of existence that do not have the same laws as ours. The mind can easily imagine this, especially since already in the laws of our spirit we notice a fundamental dissimilarity with the laws of the physical world, and the duality of our being, which we so easily notice in ourselves, gives a clear hint of the possibility of different norms and categories of existence.

All philosophies of existence created outside of Revelation present God to some enormous power, but not omnipotent. Only Christian Revelation shows Him to be truly Almighty. And since He can do everything, then, of course, He could call being out of non-existence and give the created being whatever laws He pleased, and how He could change these laws with new acts of creativity. This whole worldview is superhuman. But it is remarkable that it is precisely this and only this that explains to us all the mysterious aspects of our being.

A. S. Khomyakov excellently notes the enormous fundamental significance of, on the one hand, the Christian story of creation from nothing and, on the other, the pagan idea of birth and the world sexual principle.

“Freedom and necessity constitute that secret principle around which all human thoughts are concentrated in different images. In the language of religion, which transfers into the invisible sky the laws that govern the visible world of the earth and its visible ruler, man, freedom is expressed by creation, and necessity by birth. It is hardly possible to find symbols more faithful to personify these abstract ideas. Birth represents to the coarsest mind the inalienable nature of necessity, of bondage, just as the act of creation represents the most living and clear evidence of spiritual freedom, or, better said, will (for freedom is a negative concept, and will is positive).”

There is no freedom, no will, proclaims the principle of birth, there is only necessity.

This denies true existence, denies the highest heritage of the human spirit, and denies man’s fulfillment of the world mission assigned to him by God. On the contrary, only through creation from non-existence could we appear as free beings. If we were an emanation of the Divine, we would not have freedom, but would be drawn almost mechanically back to our Source, not as free individuals, but as component Deities. Now we can go to God and move away from Him, and even go against Him, as the greatest of the created spirits once did. This freedom of ours, which likens us to God, not bound by any external laws, creates moral responsibility. With freedom, our desire for God, of course, receives a moral value, for we have the power not out of necessity, but freely to understand Him, to love Him, to want to be with Him. We come to God not involuntarily, as the philosophy of Hinduism understands, not dissolving in the ocean of nirvana, but preserving our individuality and personality. All this is understandable only with Christian Revelation. Only it explains to us our subtlest properties.

The Christian Revelation, revealing our freedom, thereby also indicates the dangers that threaten a free and responsible being. We are not created as impersonal forces of nature, but as conscious beings who are capable of some great mission in a future renewed world, as indicated by the same Revelation. But, as free beings, people can also be threatened with death. Christian Revelation constantly warns about this, pointing to the existence in the world of the devil, the enemy of God, who is at enmity against the Creator, drawing people into the same enmity. Thus, the Christian Revelation does not lull people into thinking that there is neither good nor evil in the world or that there is no destruction, for everything comes from God. Good and evil are very real concepts and facts. Good corresponds to the will of God, for God is love, and in our conscience we recognize love as the greatest property of the spirit, equal in value only to freedom. Love and freedom are the basis and content of every moral ideal and, according to Christian Revelation, are associated with the being of the Creator of the world. This, therefore, greatest reality. But evil, which is the opposite of love and reason, is just as real, for the basis of evil lies in the self-affirmation of a created being, not original, but created. Such self-affirmation as the desire for the impossible is a kind of madness, and since it is directed against God, it is also directed against love.

Thus, Christian Revelation explains to us the greatest problems of existence - freedom, responsibility, good and evil, and explains them in a sense that people on their own, with their minds as created beings, could not imagine. All other revelations, on the contrary, say exactly what people can imagine with the help of their own reason, which draws the basis for judgments in the observation of the phenomena and laws of the created world.

Therefore, we can recognize as real Revelation only that which has been adopted by Christianity, while others are only pseudo-revelations, in reality they are not given by God, but are the fruit of the human mind. Perhaps they are partly the fruit of the mind of that opponent of God, who, probably, would not have gone against God if he believed that He is his creator and, therefore, an infinitely powerful force, which no created thing can counteract. a force incapable of even understanding the Divine existence.

In connection with this or that understanding of Revelation, the general worldview of humanity takes shape in two opposing forks, of which one worldview has a dualistic character in a certain sense, the other is monistic.

A purely religious worldview, dualistic, based on that Revelation, which we must recognize as the only Divine, recognizes the existence of two categories of being: one is Divine Being, which is essentially inaccessible to the understanding of the human mind and, in general, any “created” mind. Another category is the created world, created by God, living according to the laws given by God, and in its essence completely different from God. These two categories of being are not separated from each other precisely because God, who created the world, constantly watches over it, influences it, directs it towards some of his goals. On the contrary, the created world cannot have any influence on the Divine and even knows about God only what God Himself found necessary to reveal about Himself. According to this worldview, everything that exists constitutes the “Kingdom of God,” even in those cases when the created mind is not aware of its unconditional dependence on God’s will or does not want to be in this dependence. However, the will of God in the direction of the destinies of the created world intends to lead it to the Kingdom of God, conscious and willingly accepted by created beings. This is one worldview.

The other - pantheistic and monistic - accepts the unity of everything that exists, in which the divine element, if recognized, is not as something essentially different from the material world and from the created world in general, but only as a special manifestation of the same being, which manifests itself in the form material nature. This view does not recognize the creation of the world and the Creator. All nature - material, spiritual and the so-called “divine” - exists forever. There are beings called gods, but they are of the same nature.

If one is recognized main god, then he, in the case of the greatest recognition of his personal properties, is considered only as an organizer - a demiurge - of an eternally existing nature. Sometimes God is viewed only as a special element of nature, although penetrating everything, but only potentially possessing consciousness, reason and other spiritual properties. In this case, man can be considered an even higher being, for the divine element is only spiritual material, which in man and in the angels is concentrated into active consciousness and will.

Of course, with such a view there can be no talk of the Kingdom of God; the idea of some kind of Kingdom of Man or some other spiritual beings arises.

Thus, both of these worldviews are in deep antagonism, introducing a spiritual struggle into the world, which is reflected in the cultural, social, struggle ethical types and even in the political struggle for certain systems of civil life.

The idea of the Kingdom of God first appeared before people in the revelation of Moses, and in the final revelation it was brought by the Savior. New Testament Jewry distorted it to a large extent. Mohammedanism, having adopted the same idea of the Kingdom of God, distorted it to an even greater extent. Only Christianity can clarify it for the philosophical mind, to whose teaching one has to turn for it.

Approaching a personal God and the idea of the Kingdom of God

When a person seeks unity with the Personal God - the Creator and Providence, he thereby comes to the idea of the Kingdom of God. This idea, according to Christian Revelation, introduces world history such a general process that takes place in the souls of individual people, and throughout the human world, and in the world of spiritual non-human beings, and, finally, even has a cosmic character. And this whole process is inextricably linked with the Son of God, the Second Person Holy Trinity Who, as the Word of God, created the world; as the incarnate Word-God and man, Jesus Christ is the Savior of mankind and the Realizer of the Kingdom of God.

This is how Professor P. Svetlov outlined the idea of the Kingdom of God in his special essay on this issue.

“The idea of the Kingdom of God,” he says, “occupies an exceptional and special position in Christianity compared to its other religious and moral ideas. Even ideas about redemption, for example, or about love, give way to the all-encompassing and great idea of the Kingdom of God. It is not enough to say that this idea dominates in the New Testament - no, it combines all the Gospel teaching, both dogmatic and moral content, including the ideas of redemption and love. In this sense, the idea of the Kingdom of God is the central and fundamental idea in the Christian worldview, its cornerstone.

Briefly and precisely, the author continues, the doctrine of the purpose of the world and human life can be formulated as follows: man, like everything that exists, was created to serve God - rationally and voluntarily. Involuntarily and unconsciously, the unreasonable, even dead creation submits to the will of God, His intentions, following His laws. But rational creatures by their very nature are called to freely serve God and participate in His Kingdom. The Kingdom of God, realized in rational creatures, is the last and final goal of the creation of the world.

But, both in the visible world and in the human race, so in the invisible world or the highest rational creation, with the advent of evil, opposite the Kingdom of God, a kingdom of evil arose, with aspirations and ideas contrary to the thought of God. Evil exists primarily in the world where a person lives, and in the person himself. But the kingdom of evil is not limited to the boundaries of the earth and the human race: it rises higher above the earth and captures part of the Kingdom of God in its highest rational creation, in the angelic world. Actually, this is where evil initially arose, and His creation invades the Kingdom of God, in the place of God as the King of the universe, with its will, its thoughts, and from here evil descends lower, spreading on earth, in the human race and little by little in its struggle with goodness expands into a special kingdom that enters into conflict with the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of Satan stands in irreconcilable hostility to the Kingdom of God. Its task is to give triumph to evil over good, to the devil over God.”

This is the general setting of the world struggle, in which, as is known from Christian teaching, evil will be defeated and good will triumph in the Kingdom of God.

Christian teaching communicates much more about the Kingdom of God than this general scheme, but, to a large extent, as a great mystery. This is not such a secret as happens in esoteric teachings, not a secret of the initiated from the uninitiated, but a secret for the human mind in general, in its present state. It belongs to the realm of “unspeakable verbs, things that men should not speak.” In these mysteries we understand only what is necessary for us to fulfill the plans of God. Otherwise, the essence of the mystery can only be felt in mystical contemplation, which the one who has seen, in any case, is not able to convey when he returns to the conditions of existence of this world.

The idea of the Kingdom of God takes us to times before even the creation of this world. It was prepared for people “from the creation of the world,” but was not realized then for reasons envisaged at that time, so its achievement was the basis of the world process as it is. We find the human race at the moment when it, in the person of its ancestors, turned out to be unworthy of the life offered to it, and the sinful feelings of people were caused to be realized by the temptation of an evil spirit, which began the struggle against its Creator even earlier, in some pre-worldly times. We see our history as a process of struggle for the salvation of people, for the free implementation of God’s plans.

This process of salvation is accomplished through the union of people with God in varying degrees, depending on the “fullness of times,” that is, on something sufficiently ripe in the world. This unity of people with God here on earth constitutes the Church. It first arose in the era Old Testament. The unity that was possible then, that is, through submission to the prescribed law, by the time of Noah, Abraham and Moses constituted only the beginnings, the preparation of people for the coming of the incarnate God. “The law was,” as the Apostle Paul puts it, “a teacher to Christ,” a pedagogical means to this end. With the coming of the Savior, the Kingdom of God “came closer to people” and, although only partially realized, it clarified its content to the extent possible for us.

People are called by God to participate in His Kingdom, but this is possible only through their closest and, essentially, incomprehensible to us now unity with Christ. This is not a simple like-mindedness, but something deeper, inexpressible in our earthly ideas. How mystically inexpressible it is is evident from the fact that God chose us “in Jesus Christ” before the creation of the world, when we were not yet in the world. Then He predestined “to adopt us as sons through Jesus Christ, in order to unite all things in heaven and on earth under one Head - Christ” (Eph. 1; 3, 4, 5, 10).

What will a person be when this comes true? It's a secret. “Beloved,” says the Apostle John, “we are now children of God; but it has not yet been revealed what we will be. We only know that when it is revealed, we will be like Him” (1 Im. 3:2). There are only characteristic hints about what the world situation of people will be then.

“God did not conquer the future universe to the Angels,” says the apostle. Paul (Heb. 2:51), and reminds the Corinthians: “Do you not know that the saints will judge the world” (1 Cor. 6:2). Therefore, majestic destinies are revealed to humanity in the future Kingdom. “I think,” says the same ap. Paul, “that the sufferings of this present time are not worth anything in comparison with the glory that will be revealed in us.” The destinies of all creation are connected with the destinies of humanity. “The creation awaits with hope the revelation of the sons of God” - for “the creation itself will be freed from slavery to corruption - into the freedom of glory” (Rom. 8: 18-19). Liberation from slavery to corruption, let us remember, means immortality, non-subordination to the law of death. But all this glory will be exclusively “in Christ”, “with Christ” due to that mysterious union with Him, about which He Himself says: “I am in them, and You are in Me; that they may be perfect in one” (John 17:23).

After the preparation made during the Old Testament era, the Word of God in due course became human. Christ accomplished atonement, defeated Satan in hell, and defeated death by resurrection. God “raised us with Him and seated us in the heavenly places in Jesus Christ, so that in the coming centuries He might show us the exceeding riches of His grace” (Eph. 2:4-7). The process of salvation is already taking place, but, as we see, in some area of existence outside of time and space, where we are also “in Jesus Christ,” although we are directly still here on earth, in the former laws of existence. All this, of course, is certainly incomprehensible to our current mind, just as the apostle says: “we preach the secret, hidden wisdom of God” - “as it is written: eye has not seen, ear has not heard, and what God has prepared has not entered into the heart of man.” those who love Him." “But to us,” says the Apostle, “God has revealed this by His Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God” (1 Cor. 2: 7-10). But it is impossible to formulate in human ideas what is revealed only in the Spirit.

This will become clear in the Kingdom of the Spirit. In this existence there lies only the beginning of the development of the Kingdom of God, with the character of some evolution, as can be seen from the parables of the leaven of bread, the sower and the tares, etc. - however, with a continuous struggle against the Kingdom of God of all forces hostile to it. In the end, these hostile elements even gain a short-term victory, after which, with the second coming of the Savior, the Kingdom will finally be realized with a complete change in the conditions of existence.

In the current world, under the current laws of existence, everything has an end, death reigns everywhere. In the Kingdom of God there will be no death and the law of existence will become “eternal life.” Its onset will be accompanied by a cosmic revolution: “Suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will rise incorruptible, and we will be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption” (1 Cor. 15:52-53). All creation will be freed from slavery to corruption. The long preparation of the Kingdom will culminate in a new act of creativity. “But in those days when the seventh angel calls<...>the mystery of God will be completed” (Rev. 10; 7). At this time, He who sits on the throne will say: “Behold, I am creating everything new,” and the vision of the Seer will be fulfilled: “And I saw a new heaven and new land; for the first heaven and the first earth have passed away" (Rev. 21; 1.5).

This is the picture of world history, from beginning to end. To our earthly life it introduces the action of God, the fulfillment of His goals, and introduces into the sensory world the influence of the spiritual element, which is dominant and victorious. But this victory is achieved in the process of continuous struggle, on the one hand - for the Kingdom of God, on the other hand - against it. The end result of the process depicted by Revelation is such a triumph spiritual element that both people, and even nature itself, are transformed, recreated, become new creatures, new heaven and earth. But the very course of the historical process takes place among the present nature of earth, sky and man. The action of the spiritual forces of man and the superhuman spheres lead to the action of this world and are intertwined with all our historical events.

If there were nothing in humanity that opposes rapprochement with God, then the entire historical process could present a picture of peaceful evolution, the simple ripening of the spiritual seed. But the process takes place in a continuous struggle, because in it, in relation to God, there is not only a centripetal force, but also a centrifugal force, not just an approach to God, but also a distance from Him, a desire for a kingdom not of God, but of some other. Therefore, a continuous struggle between good and evil arises, which fills human history, its forward movements, its deviations from truth and goodness, manifesting itself in ideas, beliefs, directions, being and everything that people live with.

Removal from God the Creator and human autonomy

From the point of view of a worldview that rejected the idea of a Personal God the Creator, the entire world process, and in particular human life, appears in a completely different form.

Even the world spiritual struggle has no place here. All nature, from this point of view, is God. There are various manifestations of the divine element in it, but in all manifestations it is the same element. The life of the universe is development, evolution based on those properties and laws that are inherent in nature. At materialistic understanding nature, of course, there is no question about any kind of spiritual struggle and about any goals of world existence. Being dependent only on the forces of nature and being its product, man in the moral sense does not depend on God, but is autonomous, that is, he does what he finds best for himself and what his strength is enough for. In the spiritualistic view of nature as possessing spiritual properties, these latter are only an element and not a person. There is no God separate from nature. The life of nature is the life of the Divine, the life of the Divine is the life of nature. This life of nature is not always right for man, and he (as in Hinduism) considers it the greatest happiness to leave the sphere of the local, “manifested” nature into the sphere of the non-manifesting nature, where there is no local life. But, if the idea of “salvation” is in this sense, then it must be accomplished for oneself by the person himself, as this is most typically expressed in Buddhism. It is not God who accomplishes man’s salvation, but man himself. He himself leaves this life by denying it. He is independent, autonomous.

In other interpretations of the same “hylozoic” idea, man considers himself above the unconscious divine element of nature, for in nature there is no personality, but in man there is both consciousness and will, concentrated in one personality.

If there are other beings whose consciousness and will are concentrated in personal forms as much as the angels, then man is similar and equal to them, and perhaps even higher. His personality appears to be autonomous. In the absence of the Personal God of the Creator, there can be no “Kingdom of God”. With a view that places man above impersonal nature, the “Kingdom of Man” can appear on earth. It may be able to embrace all of nature. But Kingdom of God no and cannot be.

Man also bases such a view of the world’s existence on revelation, but not from God the Creator, but on the revelation of people who have penetrated highly into the depths of the existence of the universe. The truths they discovered from a cognitive point of view seem more reliable to him, and the current propagandists of Hinduism greatly boast that their philosophy is monistic, as true philosophy should be, and not dualistic, like that of Christians. For a mind that has rejected the Personal God, such a view is quite logical.

Indeed, a philosophy that exhausts the meaning of being should be monistic, whereas given the existence of God the Creator, who has a completely different nature from the world He created, philosophy cannot embrace the whole of being, due to the unknowability of the Divine being. Therefore, it seems to have a dualistic character, although in fact this is not true. To put it correctly, it must be said that among Christians, philosophy must be complemented by religion. Philosophy of reason alone is not enough to understand the whole of being, in which there is also uncreated being. divine and created, that is, the universe with its material and spiritual elements. Thus, in reality, the knowledge available to a Christian is incomparably deeper and more extensive than the “monistic” philosophy of Hinduism, which does not know the Deity at all and distorts its concepts of the universe by attributing autonomy to it.

Nevertheless, the philosophy of the “autonomous world” can boast that it knows it completely, while the Christian undoubtedly does not know much about the essence of God. It is impossible not to notice in this regard that such ignorance is undoubtedly supported by the Divine for the purposes intended for the development of man. For these purposes, life with God must be achieved, in which only comprehension of His being is possible. Such mystical comprehension is possible in the present life, and in the future, when people see God face to face, it will become the common lot of the “saved.” To achieve this, Divine Revelation gave people not what would be required for an exhaustive completeness of the philosophy of existence, but what is needed to come to God. Some people willingly accept this position, because they are consumed by the desire to go to God, to be with Him. Other minds, in which the prevailing desire is not to be with God, but to have at least a deceptive completeness of knowledge, prefer pseudo-revelations that supposedly satisfy this desire. In Christianity, philosophy must necessarily be complemented by religion. The supporters of an autonomous world have a dream of complete knowledge that gives power over the universe.

In fact, this imaginary completeness of knowledge is suggested by a purely human presumption, formulated by the Egyptian

Hermes Trismegistus, as if “everything that is above (that is, in the Divine world) is the same as what is below (that is, in the earthly world).” This is a simple rejection of God the Creator, the deification of nature is completely arbitrary, not proven by anything, but therefore, it has no right to be included in “knowledge.”

We said above how much in human nature draws him to God, to the search for Him. But what properties of nature, given to man by God, can lead to the opposite: to the desire to move away from God, as if to convince oneself that He, as the Creator, as an Uncreated Being, does not exist? This is because for Divine purposes it is necessary that man freely come to his Creator. Therefore it is given to man inner freedom, a divine gift, precious, but at the same time dangerous, for free will can lead a person to anything: to truth and untruth, to good and evil.

It can produce a desire not to go to God, but to move away from Him

We undoubtedly observe moods in which a person wishes that God did not exist, and is burdened by the thought of His possible existence. Analyzing such moods, we can easily notice that the reasons that lead a person to them lie in the reluctance of constraint, self-affirmation of freedom, in the fact that the feeling of freedom drowns out the other feelings of a person, especially love. Spiritual being Natsk may experience a disorder in the harmony of its properties, their atrophy and hypertrophy. Hypertrophy of the feeling of freedom can turn into a passionate desire for power. The strongest counteraction to this is love, which attracts to unity with what is beautiful, what is good, and gives the greatest sense of happiness. With a normal correlation of spiritual properties, freedom therefore attracts a person to seek God, to find happiness in Him. When the feeling of freedom is hypertrophied, it drowns out everything else, reaches the point of self-affirmation, desires nothing but its absoluteness, and therefore strives for power, since only power ensures freedom. It is easy to see that this desire, resulting from the disturbed inner harmony of man, can only result in the same violation of the entire world harmony, for it is unthinkable for all beings to be each more powerful than all others. This desire, in fact, can only lead to a struggle for power and attempts to suppress the freedom of all others, to monopolize it for oneself.

In this case, unity and love would be replaced by general mutual enmity, in which spiritual world would lose its highest properties, making it a container of the common. This, however, would destroy the very goals of creation, and therefore all the power of the Creator stands against the fulfillment of the aspirations of painful self-affirmation. A person overwhelmed by this becomes irritated by obstacles and begins to experience a painful feeling at the mere thought of the existence of God, begins to wish that He did not exist, and therefore willingly dwells on all sorts of hypotheses with the help of which he can flatter himself with the hope that God does not exist. great strength, cannot constitute a great hindrance to human omnipotence.

This is the very psychological state that Revelation depicts to us in the first enemy of God, Fallen Angel. Of course, a huge distance separates the gigantic hunger for freedom from the power of the Fallen Spirit, who once represented the beauty of the creature, and the aspirations of the little man, whose hunger sometimes goes no further than the fact that nothing prevents him from satisfying his animal appetites in the trough of earthly goods. But this difference is only quantitative, not qualitative, and Revelation categorically states that “whoever commits sin is of the devil, for the devil sinned from the beginning.” Be that as it may, moving away from God and forgetting Him constitutes the same world-historical fact as the search for God and the desire for Him. Christian revelation directly indicates in these anti-divine aspirations the extremely strong participation of the first enemy of God - the Fallen Angel, who became the spirit of evil precisely because of the struggle against God.

Both in the Israeli traditions about the devil, and in the parts of these traditions adopted by Christians, one can find a kind of mythology that tells back, in material forms, about the actions of the spirit of evil. In poetry, an example of artistic treatment of these legends is Milton's Paradise Lost. Of course, in Revelation itself we do not have such stories, for it never depicts the indescribable. The struggle that fallen spirits wage against God takes place in forms inaccessible to earthly imagination. But the very fact of the struggle is evidenced by Christian Revelation in the most positive way. Particularly detailed indications are that the devil works tirelessly among people, influencing them, trying to turn them away from God and his commandments, and through this prevent the fulfillment in the destinies of mankind of what is intended by God.

The Savior Himself gave a general picture of the historical action of the devil in humanity in the parable of the wheat and the tares: “The wheat, the good seed, are the Sons of the Kingdom,” and the tares are the sons of the evil one. Christ sowed the good seed, but the tares are the enemy, who is the devil. These tares will grow together with the good seed until the very end of the world. Professor A. Belyaev believes that this parable outlines “the world history of the human race from beginning to end.”

In addition to this direct action of the evil spirit, the very nature of people, since the time of the Fall, has assimilated something satanic and has become part of the nature of the evil spirit. The Fall brought together various elements of self-affirmation, including, among other things, the seductive thought of becoming “like the gods.” People seem to have poisoned themselves with the spirit of the devil and introduced duality into their nature. There remained in them that on the basis of which they could turn to God with the words “Our Father,” and that which the Savior said also appeared: “You are of your father the devil, and you desire the lusts of your father.” With this duality, the history of mankind began and continues, with all its vicissitudes, with the task of freeing itself from the infection instilled by the devil. But this task is very difficult. After the completion of the atonement, the possibility of close unity with God (“in Christ”) appeared before people, but none of the circumstances that tempt people to seek their independence, to do “their own will”, thereby cutting off a person from God, disappeared.

The idea of human autonomy, according to the Christian view, is nothing more than an illusion. Revelation categorically denies the possibility of human autonomy, asserting that, according to the state of a person’s strength, he has no choice but to be either a “slave of God” or a “slave of the devil” (see, for example: Acts 26, 18; Rom. 6, 17 , 18, 22). It is possible that this circumstance is fully recognized by Dianol, who seduces a person with the dream of autonomy in the confidence of subjugating him as soon as he distracts him from God. In history, indeed, although in weak forms, there have been and are repeated the phenomena of “diabolism”, “Satan theology” - the worship of man to the devil. But if the worship of Satan has hitherto been a rather rare phenomenon, then the idea of human autonomy, the idea of the “kingdom of man” has the widest place in history.

Historical development of basic religious and philosophical ideas

As stated above, there are only two main religious and philosophical ideas that provided the starting points for the worldview of mankind. On the one hand, people have the idea of dominion over the world and everything that exists by the Highest Supercreated God, Who Himself created, called out of non-existence everything that exists in the world, gave the laws of existence and destined known goals for everything, being the Creator and Provider of the world and man. On the other hand, the thought arises of the self-essence of nature, not created by anyone, always existing and always living according to its inherent laws.

These ideas have lived in humanity since time immemorial, and still live today. Being opposite to each other, they mutually exclude one another and fight among themselves with varying success. They alternately took over the minds of people so widely that sometimes it seemed as if one was ready to completely drown out the other, but each time this turned out to be a temporary success. There have been attempts to unite them, but each time they turned out to be unsuccessful. This is understandable, because it is impossible to organically merge such opposing ideas, it is impossible to embrace them with any other higher unifying idea, but only mechanically “synthesize”, connect together, and, without being destroyed in this syncretism, they continue the internal struggle and again disperse, just as water and oil spread into separate layers, no matter how much they are shaken in one vessel.

So both basic ideas, basic ideas about the highest power, on which everything else depends, including our ethics and our duty, our tasks in relation to ourselves and everyone around us - these basic ideas remain forever in the human race, which is not dependent on either of them did not refuse and continues to be divided into two layers, adjoining either the first idea or the second. There is hardly any doubt that the numerical superiority always belonged to the layer that believed in the originality of nature and did not believe in God the Creator.

However, each of these ideas, while keeping its foundation unshakable, did not remain motionless and had a certain evolution or, to use the Christian term, “disclosure,” and at the same time represented numerous variations, processing, and improvement. This should especially say about the idea of the originality of nature, which, in essence, comes from the work of the human mind and is not connected, or to a lesser extent, by the content of superhuman revelations.

In total, the religious and philosophical content of humanity can be imagined [as follows:] for a long series of millennia [it] remained imbued with confidence in the originality of nature, eternally existing and not having any Creator, but possessing only organizers, who, however, arise from the same, from the forces inherent in it. This huge thickness of nature lovers is cut through, as it were, by some kind of wedge - a layer of admirers of the One Creator, Creator, Organizer and Provider of the universe and all its forces, material and spiritual. The influences of the first idea from all sides put pressure and influence on the layer of believers in the One God, Creator and Provider, in turn undergoing influence from the latter. From these intersecting influences schools of a mixed nature are born from time to time. When they try to syncretize both spheres of belief, they turn out to be short-lived, but sometimes they only supplement their doctrines with foreign points of view and then introduce new variations into the basic philosophy. Thus, at present, the Hindu Brahmo Somaj movement has introduced European philosophy some concept of personality in Hindu philosophy, which certainly denies personality. Mostly all such phenomena took place in the sphere of admirers of original nature.

The idea of God the Creator and Provider could not introduce into its philosophy any borrowings from the ideas of original nature except by abandoning itself. Although Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans often fell under the alien influences of pantheism, the resulting teachings became clearly heretical and were thrown out of orthodox doctrine.

Thus, in Christianity, Gnosticism was soon denied even the name of Christian teaching. It is worse for Jews with Kabbalah, which continues to remain an element of supposedly Jewish teaching, although it is in fundamental contradiction with actual Mosaicism and the teaching of the prophets. In Mohammedanism, pantheistic sects are also not unconditionally cut off from the orthodox teaching. Nevertheless, when we talk about the Jewish faith, we do not mean Kabbalism, but either the Mosaic-prophetic doctrines, or their Talmudic interpretation, and when we talk about Mohammedanism, we mean the teachings of Mohammed with its main document - the Koran.

In general, the idea of God the Creator and Provider and the resulting idea of the Kingdom of God represents following points disclosures and interpretations:

1. Initially, the development of the bearer of this idea, that is, the Jewish people, is being developed, which is historically associated with the isolation of the tribe of Abraham, first in Palestine, then in Egypt.

2. Then Moses receives his Revelation, and the first example of the society of God, or the people of God, develops in Palestine during the time of the Judges and Kings of Israel, and pagan beliefs constantly distort the Mosaic faith.

3. Finally, the Jews, for their constant betrayals, are subjected to a new exile - to Babylonia. During this period, the Mosaic Revelation is supplemented by the prophetic, and faith in God the Creator and Provider is clarified and affirmed; on the other hand, there are new distortions of this: firstly, in the emergence of the ideas of the Kingdom of the Israeli people as supposedly representing the true realization of the Kingdom of God, and secondly, in the immersion of Jewish thought in pagan mysticism (Kabbalism). This era is historically associated with the Babylonian captivity, the restoration of Jerusalem, times of Jewish uprisings, as well as Jewish proselytism, which prepared the way for the spread of Christianity. After this preparation comes the Revelation of the Savior and the worldwide preaching of Christianity. Judaism, confining itself to the Talmud, is isolated from the whole world and absorbed by the idea of the Kingdom of Israel, instead of realizing which it is again scattered into exile throughout the world.

Meanwhile, Christianity is subject to the distortions of Gnosticism, as a result of which the era of the development of true dogma begins.

Quite unexpectedly, after 600 years, there is a new interpretation of the idea of God the Creator and the Kingdom of God in the Magomst teaching, which was formed from a mixture of Jewry, Christianity and ancient Arabic legends about the One God. The idea of Mohammedanism is characterized by the intention to subject all nations to the Kingdom of God under the threat of death, in best case scenario- enslavement.

Several hundred years of history were devoted to the political and cultural struggle of Christianity with Mohammedanism.

Further interpretation of the idea of God the Creator and Provider was expressed only in the appearance of several Christian confessions:

Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant. Their struggle among themselves, as well as with Mohammedanism, Jewry and with the teachings of pantheistic mysticism, hidden in various sects and secret societies, fill new story, during which is also the impact of Christianity on the Hindu and Buddhist world.

In the further course of time, Christianity increasingly moves into a defensive position due to the appearance in its own domains of the ideas of pantheistic mysticism and materialism, also based on the recognition of the mysteries of eternity and the originality of nature, with the denial of the idea of God the Creator.

In general, the idea of God the Creator and the Kingdom of God thus had very few variations. There are three of them: 1) the particular idea of the Kingdom of God in the teachings of Moses, the prophets and - finally - in the Revelation of the Savior; 2) Jewish Talmudic version - the transfer of the Kingdom of God to the earthly dominion of the Kingdom of Israel; 3) Mohammedan version - transferred the Kingdom of God to the earthly kingdom of the faithful. In both last options, however, the Kingdom of God in the future Heavenly existence of people is not excluded.

The idea of eternal self-drying nature is manifested in very diverse religious and philosophical concepts. Among them, polytheism, polytheism, is especially striking, in which at first glance it is difficult even to recognize the idea of an eternal self-existent nature, essentially impersonal, while polytheism populates the world with many personal divine beings. This form of belief is characteristic of absolutely all peoples in different eras of their development. Polytheism reigns among the rudest savages who have survived to our times, but it also constituted the religion of peoples who have reached a high degree of culture. Its echoes are also preserved among monotheistic peoples in their folklore. The creatures revered in polytheism are of a completely personal nature; all the attributes of personality are attributed to them, and many of them even have a providential character. For the most part, they are the patrons of only individual peoples or individual localities, but sometimes they even achieve a general providential role, such as Zeus-Jupiter, guiding the lives of people in general.

In these creatures it would be difficult to recognize the manifestation of an eternal, most valuable nature if we did not know such religions in which, along with the polytheism of the masses, a highly developed philosophy of existence existed in the priestly and generally educated class. Religions such as ancient Egyptian or Hindu explain that these relatively minor deities are nothing more than individual manifestations of the eternal self-existent nature. It is fragmented in individual phenomena, descending lower and lower in their particulars, and everywhere gives birth to many “gods”.

Why do these particular, concrete manifestations of self-existent nature acquire a personal character that nature as a whole does not have? This - in a rather rough analogy - can be explained by comparison with humanity. Each individual person is a person, and humanity, from which he is born and of which he is a part, has no personal character, is not a special being at all. The general idea of the admirers of self-existent nature is that impersonal nature, in which the properties of consciousness and feeling are diffused only as a certain constituent element, can acquire a personal character only in individual focuses of the concentration of this element. This is the general logic of all people who do not see God the Creator in the world, for the impersonality of nature as a whole is too clear.

Its laws, taken as a whole, are so constant and unchangeable that it is impossible to discern personal will in the mix. Where obvious necessity operates, it is just as obvious that there cannot be a personality whose main characteristic is a certain freedom of action. In individual natural phenomena, changeable, even sometimes capricious, the action of which is decomposed into hundreds of different ways, a person, on the contrary, naturally sees some kind of personal being similar to himself. He anthropomorphizes these specific individual natural phenomena, of which he himself is one. But he cannot anthropomorphize the entire totality of integral nature, which does not show any personal properties to him.

Thus, polytheism is one of the expressions of the religion of nature, the belief in its self-existence and eternity, and that, although it does not constitute a Personal God, it is capable of generating personal gods as a concentrated manifestation of its impersonal properties. But there is great variety in the different treatments of the polytheistic idea. Sometimes polytheism gives a personal character to individual forces and natural phenomena. Sometimes he assumes that there are separate spirits behind them - [these are] some creatures, according to their psychic properties human-like, but living in spheres of existence other than him and, as a result, different from humans, for example, in the ability to be invisible, enormous strength, speed of movement, influence on the forces of nature, etc. Sometimes in these creatures a person sees the souls of dead people who have passed into other spheres of existence. These souls of ancestors sometimes merge in the ideas of polytheists with the spirits of nature, and the spirits of ancestors are attributed to participation in the phenomena of nature and even in the structure of its forces. Thus, the Hindu “manus”, who are the ancestors of people, are credited with a huge role in the creation of various parts of nature, along with the activities of the gods generated by the eternal self-existent nature itself.

Belief in spirits in general and spirits of nature in particular led to the fact that the existence of “gods” was recognized even by pure atheists, like Buddha, and also by philosophers, like Heraclitus, who saw in the action of the universe, taken as a whole, only a correct mechanism with unchanging laws, excluding any volitional element. And since the laws of nature are unchangeable and have their own logic of manifestation and action, polytheistic peoples had a belief in some rock, fate, mythologically developed in the ideas of moirai, ananka, parks, etc., the decision of which is obligatory and unchangeable even for gods.

In this belief in some kind of power higher than the gods, some researchers suggest a vague echo of the primary belief in the One God the Creator. Of course, given the origin of people from a single ancestor Adam, who knew about the existence of the One God the Creator, it is quite logical to assume the existence of the tradition of the first people about this God, forgotten by people under the pressure of beliefs in the deities of nature.

As for the polytheistic gods, wherever we know well the beliefs of people, these gods did not have an eternity of existence. Sooner or later they returned to the bosom of nature that gave birth to them. The end of the gods was the belief of both the ancient Egyptians and the peoples of the classical world. The existence of the gods was long, but not eternal, while the self-existent nature that gave birth to them had neither the beginning nor the end of its existence.

But belief in a self-existent eternal nature gives rise to more than just polytheistic concepts. It even more logically creates the philosophy of pantheism and atheism.

Pure pantheism, representing eternal nature as possessing psychic properties, believes that divine properties permeate all of nature, not in the form of any spirits, but throughout its entire being, nowhere concentrated in individual spiritual personalities. The laws of nature are a manifestation of these divine properties of hers, as eternal and unchanging as she herself. If at the same time we can assume will in the pantheistic nature, then it is in any case unchangeable. If there is a deity here, then it acts eternally in the same way, unchanged. With such a view there is no support for the belief in free will, which constitutes the main characteristic of personality, and the pantheistic deity loses all personal character. But this is tantamount to the absence of a deity, and therefore atheism, the denial of the existence of God, is the brother of pangeism.

Atheism, however, itself represents two varieties: 1) spiritualistic atheism, which denies the existence of God, but does not deny the existence of the spiritual properties of being; 2) materialistic atheism, which does not recognize the existence of anything other than the physical, material world, and all the so-called spiritual properties of a person presuppose the manifestation of physical laws. In a philosophical sense, this is, of course, the most crude, untenable doctrine, which directly turns a blind eye to a whole half of the phenomena of existence. Nevertheless, materialism exists among people and can even sometimes become the dominant worldview. It seduces with its extreme simplicity and categoricalness.

It is much more complex and difficult for human thought to process spiritualistic atheism, of which the main expression is the philosophy of Buddhism.

If we begin to classify the development of the idea of an eternal self-existent nature in the logical order of thought, we must say that atheism constitutes its final completion in two opposite directions. Materialistic atheism makes no sense of the idea of self-existent nature, taking away from it all spiritual properties. Spiritualistic atheism commits complete suicide of the idea of self-existent nature, for it comes to deny the reality of this nature and recognizes as existing only the mental properties of a person, remaining with them in the vast emptiness of non-existence, which illusorily appears to him as being, due to his own self-deception. But man has the power to destroy this self-deception, which is the only reasonable goal of his life. With the completion of this goal, man - this one undeniable speck of self-existent nature - leaves completely out of existence and passes into an unknown nirvana, where it is unknown whether there is anything, but, in any case, there is no what people here call eternal self-existent nature.

The historical life of philosophical and religious ideas, however, in general does not represent the course of the logical development of any of them, but their eternal struggle and combinations. The logical development of one or another idea also occurs as a private process. But in common life Of humanity, we constantly see that instead of calming down at the logical end of an idea, people make a turn back or in a strogga, return to abandoned points of view or combine them with others. A number of nations and generations are trying to solve the mystery of the meaning of their existence, which is inextricably linked with the solution to the question of where is the main force of being, for only in adapting to it is it decided what a person should do, how to develop himself, how to live, where to go? People cannot solve this question only on the basis of trust in the work of their predecessors and constantly revise the decisions made before them, try to find new ways for these decisions and thus created a number of concepts representing a vast area of science about the religious and philosophical life of mankind. But with all these efforts, people have long since reconsidered all possible points of view, which are only beginning to be repeated, albeit with somewhat new combinations, the insignificance of which is easily seen by the philosophizing mind.

In the historical development of religious and philosophical ideas, we see their mutual struggle and mutual influence. This occurs on the basis of two main ideas: the idea of God the Creator and Provider, standing outside the truth He created and directing it to His goals, and the idea of an eternal, self-existent nature. The same struggle and mutual influence occur in the secondary divisions of the main ideas. In this great process, it gradually became clear that people in the work and struggle of their thoughts no longer find new solutions and that they can only face the implementation of those conclusions to which each of the basic ideas leads. And these conclusions consist, in one case, in the achievement of the Kingdom of God, in another case - in the implementation of the universal kingdom of man, and for people it remains little realized, but not hidden, that the supposed kingdom of man may in fact turn out to be the kingdom of the enemy of God - the devil, who acted during the struggle of basic religious and philosophical ideas quite secretly, as if from behind the scenes, so that his reality is revealed by Divine Revelation, but very poorly grasped

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Orthodoxy and modernity. Digital library
Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov (1852-1923)
Religious and Philosophical Foundations of History
© Holy Trinity Orthodox Mission
Content
Spiritual struggle in history
Philosophy of history and religion
Purpose of life and religious knowledge
God-seeking and revelation
Approaching a personal God and the idea of the Kingdom of God
Removal from God the Creator and human autonomy
Historical development of basic religious and philosophical ideas
Pagan era
General character of paganism
Spraying deity in nature
Scheme by L. A. Tikhomirov. Indian paganism
Religious teachings Hindus
Philosophical schools Hindus
Depreciation of the concept of God
The moral influence of paganism
Mystic
Pagan philosophy of existence
The trend of irreligion
God-seeking of the classical world
Evolutionary potential of the idea of paganism
Syncretic teachings
The emergence of Kabbalah
Kabbalistic worldview
Practical Kabbalah
General meaning of Kabbalah
Notes
Christian era
New revelation. Life in Christ
Victory of Christianity
Development of dogma
Church and monasticism
Christian statehood
The Compulsory Element in the History of Christianity
Christian culture
Notes
Islam
Prophet of Islam
Basic Character of Islam
Outsiders in Islam
Exotericism and esotericism of Islam
Religion of earthly domination
The Resurrection of Pagan Mysticism and Economic Materialism
Rationalism in the service of mysticism

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Invasion of spirits, magicians and adepts
Teachings of the occult
Are the sources of occult knowledge reliable?
Christian spiritual life
Stability of basic worldviews
Atheistic embodiment of the religious ideal
The socialist system and supersensible existence
Notes
Spiritual struggle in history
Philosophy of history and religion
In philosophical knowledge we strive to understand the inner meaning of the process of our study, and this task in relation to the history of mankind leads us to bring a religious point of view into the field of observation of historical events.
Historical science will give us information about the path and under the influence of what external conditions humanity developed. But external knowledge of the external course of phenomena alone is not capable of satisfying our demands regarding such an evolution in which the human spirit, consciousness, and personality are manifested. The question of the meaning of such a process inevitably [leads] to the same questions that confront us in relation to our personal lives. A person asks himself: why did he come into the world, what will he leave it with, what connects the beginning of life, its course and its end? These questions also arise before us when thinking about the collective life of people. Personal life and collective life are so closely connected that we cannot understand them without illuminating personal life by social conditions and social conditions by the properties of the individual.
Refusing this, we would have to come to the conclusion that history has absolutely no reasonable sense, that is goals its beginning, middle and end.
It turns into a soulless process of nature, in which we can somehow only trace the sequence of causes and effects, which began unknown why and lead unknown to what, and, in any case, alien conscious
premeditation. But a consciously living person cannot reconcile himself with such a view. Even lowering your exhausted hands when you fail to grab meaning events, we do not rest for long in this cognitive despair, and at the slightest opportunity to find some data for judgment, humanity again rushes to the eternal question of the goals of life, the goals of history.
This persistence of our consciousness is completely legitimate, for, reconciling ourselves with the impossibility of understanding the goals of life, we would condemn ourselves to the unconsciousness of existence, and therefore would have to renounce everything high in our personality and admit that there is no difference between high and low. The question of what is high and noble and what is low and vile depends entirely on the goals of life. What would be high for some purposes will have to be considered absurd for other purposes. We can evaluate our personality and our development only in relation to certain goals of world life, and if they do not exist or if we do not know them, then there is no personal meaningful life, and therefore there is no precisely that for which it is worth live.
That is why humanity has never been able to come to terms with ignorance of the goals of personal and world life, which are completely inseparable. People have always shaken themselves after moments of cognitive despair, and this comes out all the more natural because the recognition of the inaccessibility of the goals of life to us is in fact completely unfounded and is only due to the arbitrary assumption that we have the only way of cognition - precisely based on the testimony of the organs of our external senses. But we , besides this knowledge, which is called mediocre
(obtained through the external senses), we also have internal knowledge, which is called direct, that is, obtained without the mediation of these organs.

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External objective knowledge, notes P. E. Astafiev, tells us not about the internal essence of an object, but only about how it is determined by external relations to what is outside it... But is all our knowledge like this? Is everything that we really know and that we vitally need to know given to our thought under the condition of an external and independent objectivity, cognizable by us only in parts, in an external phenomenon, phenomenally and critically? For example, it is not under this condition that we are given our own being, our own “I”, our own will, moving causes, final goals, principles and ideals... We know all this By
essentially, internally, directly. Without such direct knowledge of our inner world, will would be impossible, and our “I” would not exist. The subject’s knowledge of himself is drawn exclusively from the inner world, given to internal experience, and no knowledge of external objects and their external relationships can add anything to this knowledge (P. E. Astafiev. Faith and knowledge in the unity of worldview.
Experience of the beginnings of critical monadology. M., 1893. Chapter nine).
I do not consider it possible to accept the terms “essential knowledge” and “phenomenal knowledge” used by P. E. Astafiev. But the question here is posed absolutely correctly. We have two ways of knowing: external and internal.
Internal knowledge is fundamental. Without it, we could not attach any real meaning to external knowledge. Our “I”, our consciousness, will - all this is cognized only by internal perception. And if there is consciousness, will and feeling in the world, then we can cognize them only in the same way as we cognize our “I,” that is, based on internal mental perception. And this brings us to the introduction
religious idea to the tasks of cognition.
The religious idea consists in recognizing the connection of man with that Highest conscious and guiding element of the world, which we call the Divine and in which, due to the presence of consciousness and will in it, we can seek the goals of the life of the world. Man's inner consciousness says that just as we cognize my personality directly, we can cognize the Divine with the same direct perception. Just as in self-knowledge the unity of the cognizing subject with the cognitive object occurs, so in the knowledge of the Divine the unity of the cognizing subject (that is, man) with the cognitive object (God) can occur.
Here we enter the area faith. Many people don't believe it, and that's their right. But unbelief is usually based on the fact that God is not shown by our objective knowledge, that God is not revealed by the organs of our external senses. This basis of unbelief can no longer be recognized by reason. The external sense organs detect only phenomena of a physical nature. If these organs do not detect God, then the only reasonable conclusion that follows from this is that God is not one of the objects of nature, but not that He does not exist at all. Using the objective method of cognition, we cannot discover the existence of our personality, that is, its will and consciousness. But it does not follow from this that our “I” does not exist. The existence of our personality is affirmed by our inner consciousness and is not subject to any challenge, since this consciousness is the only criterion for the reliability of all sources of knowledge. This is our primary and basic knowledge. Exact science cannot further enter into the discussion of such issues, because to deny and prove something means to discuss the doubtful on the basis of the reliable. Therefore, there can be no question of proving the reality of something. primary, which is the only basis for any further proofs or denials. If we recognized the unreliability of our immediate consciousness of our “I,” then this would mean, all the more, the unreliability of the testimony of the senses, and, consequently, of all objects and natural phenomena that we know about through the testimony of these senses.
A person may not believe in God, but must understand that this disbelief has no evidence for itself: it is not the result of any knowledge, but simply atheistic

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faith. Moreover, if we do not admit the existence of God or the possibility of being in connection with Him (religion), then we must, of course, abandon any philosophy of history.
Subject knowledge indicates only the external connection of phenomena. Goals can generally be known only in will and consciousness. Therefore, we cannot recognize the goals of history and its philosophy in any other way than by introducing the testimony of religious knowledge into the solution of the issue.
Of course, these readings may not be accurate or may be misinterpreted. They can be viewed critically, they can be checked, compared, etc. But we can seek knowledge of goals only in the field of religious testimony. It has always made clear to people the meaning of their personal and world life. On this basis there were and are many mutual bickering and disagreements, but still people could not do without using this source of their knowledge.
However, in the circumstance that we are forced to resort to this source of knowledge, there is nothing that our cognizing mind could regret. It is extremely useful for epistemology that we have two different ways of cognition: internal, immediate, and external, objective. This duality contributes to the accuracy of cognition. Touching upon various aspects of the same circumstance or object, our external and internal knowledge can be mutually replenished and can provide considerations for critical verification of the evidence of external and internal observation.
As P. E. Astafiev very interestingly proves this in the above-cited work
(“Faith and Knowledge”), we, having as the primary method of cognition only the immediate, designed to understand an object according to its internal content, we ourselves created external knowledge precisely in order to see what objects are like in their external phenomena and relationships.
The method of knowledge on which faith is based, that is, direct perception, is not rejected in the total sum of knowledge, but is only supplemented by the objective method of recognition.
Same with regards goals personal life and the historical process, indications of religion are significantly supplemented by data from external historical science. But we can still enter the field of philosophy of history only if we are convinced of the need for it to show not only external, called exact, knowledge, but also knowledge gleaned from religious soil.
This last knowledge is based on the connection and communication of a person with the Divine, with the Highest active and creative principle, from which we can only gain any information about the basic problems of existence. Indications emanating from this source are called revelation. Throughout their historical lives, people have used actual or supposed revelation. But, as we know, the revelations were numerous and far from identical. This is precisely what raises doubts about the reality of revelation in general. However, such doubt is completely unfounded, because in reality - in the diversity of revelations - we only receive more durable ways to understand the meaning of life.
That some of them are incorrect and do not actually belong to the Divine or do not belong to the Divine is quite obvious, since revelations do not tell a person the same thing. But when examining them, we are convinced that our mind is capable of critical analysis in this area, as a result of which, discarding the erroneous and illusory, we, however, see the more firmly the nature of superhuman revelation in other messages from this single source. If humanity had only one revelation, its thought could not consciously perceive truths, its mind would fall silent in the presence of testimony from above, but would not be imbued with conscious trust. On the contrary, given the position of the sources of religious knowledge, we are forced to seek conscious conviction in where the voice of real truth sounds and where there is a deception of human conjecture or even a malicious forgery.

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The result is trust, but a conscious one, strengthened by the reasonable rejection of everything erroneous and falsified.
Such a search for true revelation is necessary, because only true, unmistakable revelation indicates the meaning of being, the meaning of life, and, consequently, the goals of our personal life, the nature of the development that we must give ourselves, and accordingly, our assessments of world history, assessments of what in it should be recognized as great, realizing the goals of world life, and what, on the contrary, should be considered as violating these goals, leading them astray from the path of implementation, and therefore harmful for a person’s personal development and for the fulfillment of his world mission. In this analysis, we first enter into a premonition that world life is an area of great struggle in which the destinies of mankind were decided and are being decided, not only what people themselves want to be and what they desire for themselves, but what the Higher forces of universal existence delivered purpose world life, the purpose for which people received this particular nature and abilities, and not any other.
Thus, the religious idea, which brings with it the search for revelation, is necessary for the philosophy of history. Without any idea of the action of some Higher conscious and guiding force, it is unthinkable to search for the meaning of history.
The general picture of world life, even with the help of this light, is still not easy to understand. The facts that make up this life are extremely complex and, as it were, fragmentary. We see how millennia after millennia of human life go by, of which the memory of posterity retains very little. People work, struggle, look for ways to satisfy their various needs, organize their societies and states, and in all this work they have in mind their immediate goals, mostly lower material needs, and if over this work there is still an idea about the general meaning of life, then in the vast majority of cases people wander around this issue in semi-darkness. They express their understanding of it (general meaning. - M.
WITH). most often in the form of difficult to understand symbols, in mythological ideas, and even philosophical ideas are often clothed in figurative forms and terms, the exact meaning of which is forgotten by subsequent generations. A long thousand-year process, developing in different countries, under different conditions, among different races, with different languages, difficult to understand in itself, becomes even more mysterious due to the paucity of materials left behind by obsolete peoples. Despite the enormous efforts of historical science and its sometimes unexpectedly amazing successes in understanding the distant past, we would be completely unable to grasp the general meaning of this life if we did not have the help of a religious idea in the lives of people of the past and in our own spiritual abilities. It throws light on the past, present and even the future.
The development and struggle of ideas occurs not only in the minds of people, but also in their very lives - personal, social and political. What we consider in philosophical reasoning as the content of ideas, in the history of mankind is the struggle of nations, classes, states, cultures. This does not depend on the fact that ideas, as other philosophers thought, were the real essence of being, but because the real essence of being is reflected equally, on the one hand, in the feelings and aspirations of people, in the entire structure of their lives, in their struggle social and political, and on the other hand - in ideas. Ideas constitute an abstract formulation of those forces that interact with each other in life. But consider the content and relationship religious and philosophical ideas are easier than grasping the immense complexity of historical events. Those who see religious and philosophical knowledge as something abstract and of no practical significance in life are mistaken. On the contrary, philosophical knowledge gives us the true key to the knowledge of historical evolution.

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Purpose of life and religious knowledge
People brought up on a non-religious worldview look for in history only the struggle of human interests in the narrowest sense, and the possibility of the influence of other factors, extrahuman and superhuman, seems incredible to them and, in any case, not amenable to visual calculation. This view is extremely narrow.
We know the influence of non-human factors on history even in the purely material sphere. We know that the influences of nature, independent of man, provide a certain framework for his life and activity, which cannot be passed over. Everyone recognizes this as quite natural. Skepticism raises its voice only in relation to whether, among the influences outside of man, there is anything emanating from Divine purposes?
But the question here comes down to this: is there any influence of the Highest Principle, the Highest World Power in the life of man and humanity? We see and undoubtedly admit the influence of secondary forces on history: climatic, geological conditions, the relationship between land and sea space, the direction of river flow, etc.
Pure materialists, who do not recognize anything in reality except physical forces, of course, cannot take into account anything higher than them. But ignoring the action
Divine power is remarkably inconsistent among those historians who acknowledge the existence of our spiritual powers and the existence of the Deity. Is it possible to assume that only

Lev Tikhomirov Religious and philosophical foundations of history

M. Smolin. The comprehensive ideal of Lev Tikhomirov

Preface

Section I. Spiritual struggle in history

1. Philosophy of history and religion

2. Life goals and religious knowledge

3. God-seeking and Revelation

4. Approaching the Personal God and the idea of the Kingdom of God

5. Removal from God the Creator and human autonomy

6. Historical development of basic religious and philosophical ideas

Division II. Pagan era

7. General character of paganism

8. Dispersion of the Deity in nature

9. Downplaying the concept of deity

10. The moral influence of paganism

11. Mysticism

12. Pagan philosophy of existence

13. The trend of irreligion

14. God-seeking of the classical world

15. Evolutionary potential of the idea of paganism

Division III. Revelation of the Supercreative Creator

16. Election of Israel

17. The Rise and Fall of Israel

18. Israel Mission

19. New Testament Revelation

20. The originality of the Christian teaching about God the Word

21. Legend of Christian esotericism

Division IV. Syncretic teachings

22. The meaning of syncretism

23. Gnosticism

24. Extra-Christian syncretism (Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, Manichaeism)

25. The emergence of Kabbalah

26. Kabbalistic worldview

27. Practical Kabbalah

28. General meaning of Kabbalah

Section V. Christian era

29. New Revelation. Life in Christ

30. Victory of Christianity

31. Development of dogma

32. Church and monasticism

33. Christian statehood

34. The coercive element in the history of Christianity

35. Christian culture

Section VI. Islam

Section VII. New Testament Israel

41. The fate of the Jews "golusa" (dispersion)

42. Jewish creation of the kingdom of Israel

43. Jews in Christendom

44. Jews in Turkey

45. The era of Jewish equality, or the Emancipation of the Jews

46. Organization and government of the Jews

47. Two Israels

Section VIII. Secret teachings and societies

Section IX. The Resurrection of Pagan Mysticism and Economic Materialism

Section X. Completing the circle of world evolution

63. Eschatological teaching

64. General character of contemplations and revelations

65. Old Testament prophecies

66. Millennial Kingdom (chiliasm)

67. Seven New Testament eras

68. The beginning of New Testament history

69. In the desert of the world

70. About the “retreat”, about the one who “detains” him and about the adulterous wife

71. End Times

@ Publication by the editors of the magazine "Moscow". 1997

The comprehensive ideal of Lev Tikhomirov

The name of the outstanding thinker Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov (1852-1923) still remains a mystery for Russian society. And many people are not familiar with it at all.

Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov was born on January 19, 1852 in the military fortification of Gelendzhik in the Caucasus, in the family of a military doctor. After graduating from the Kerch Alexander Gymnasium with a gold medal, he entered the Imperial Moscow University in 1870, where he fell into the circle of Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries. In 1873, L. A. Tikhomirov was arrested and convicted in the case of the “193s”. He spends more than four years in the Peter and Paul Fortress. In 1878, in January, L. A. Tikhomirov was released, leaving him under administrative supervision with his parents. But already in October of the same year, he secretly left his parents’ home and went underground to continue his revolutionary activities. At this time, he was already a member of "Land and Freedom", striving to carry out a coup d'etat with the aim of convening the Constituent Assembly or establishing a revolutionary dictatorship (depending on the prevailing circumstances).

Virgo

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